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One of the more interesting additions to the card is the inclusion of ATI's Theatre 200 Chip, the successor to the original Rage Theatre Chip found on previous incarnations of the All-In-Wonder Series. The Theatre 200 now provides a stereo signal decoder, so the usage of the Micronas decoder chip found on earlier generations is now unnecessary. The obvious advantage is one chip will draw less power than two separate chips, and also reduces the clutter on the card, albeit not by a noticeable margin.
Theatre 200 in the flesh
One notable improvement the inclusion of the Theatre 200 brings is the usage of a 12-bit analogue to digital converter (ADC), which should result in an improved quality video signal in comparison to that of the ADC's used in the original Rage Theatre, which were only 9-bit.
The Theatre 200 also boasts the addition of a revised comb filter. The comb filter is involved with composite signal separation, i.e. the separation of a video signal's colour and luminance information. Older or less performing implementations of the comb filter would result in artifacts in the image after the signal separation has occurred. The updated comb filter within the Theatre 200 promises to help reduce the occurrence of this degradation in image quality, resulting in an overall much cleaner composite video image.
ATI have chosen to use a Philips analogue tuner, as with previous generations of All-In-Wonder Products, and the tuner on this card has significantly reduced in size compared the earlier versions. At one stage, with their All-In-Wonder 8500DV, ATI did adopt a Digital TV Tuner Chip. The advantages of using such a device over the traditional analogue tuner was that in theory, the signal would be higher quality, and the actual tuning of the TV channels would be slightly faster. This begs the question as to why ATI reverted back to the original analogue tuner.
The two main reasons are power and necessity. The digital tuner would have had higher power consumption than the standard tuner, and adding yet another chip to an already cramped card wasn't as simple as they had hoped. Also, in regard to the quality of today's TV broadcasts, even those transmissions that are digital, the higher quality signal just wasn't necessary.
This same point of necessity holds true for some of the features of the Theatre 200 Chip. Although improvements are apparent from mere specification, for a standard European TV Transmission, users are unlikely to notice a huge difference in image quality on this card compared to previous generations of All-In-Wonder Radeon based cards because the transmission would be way too noisy to benefit.
Where the upgraded Theatre 200 does play a beneficial role however, is DVD and Output, which demand a much higher quality picture. So the inclusion of the Theatre 200 does yield some benefits.
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