Product Review: Pinnacle PCTV Pro Stick

The Pinnacle PCTV Pro Stick is the easy to get analog and full digital HDTV to your computer along with full Digital Video Recorder functionality.

Ease of Use, Performance: 22/25, Look & Feel: 23/25,
Features 24/25, How much I enjoy 24/25

Total: 93/100

The Pinnacle PCTV Pro Stick is the easy way to get HDTV on your PC with plenty of features including a DVR and remote but also includes radio. You can get plenty of television stations just like the regular TV channels you would normally get on your computer as well as radio.

The Pinnacle PCTV Pro Stick comes with the USB HDTV Stick, a portable telescoping antenna, mini-remote with AAA batteries, A/V Adapter cable, USB cable, quick start guide and DVD with drivers and TVCenter Pro. The Pinnacle HDTV Pro works just like a TV Tuner to allow reception of both analog and digital television, ATSC/ClearQAM/NTSC, and FM radio.

Television reception will of course depend mostly on your area and how well you would normally get the television stations or radio. The little portable antenna is more for moving around with your laptop computer and trying your luck at getting TV reception with it.

But I have no problems getting a few channels with it sitting on my desk, but you have to understand a bit about my setup. I have an outdoor TV antenna for my normal viewing and get thirteen channels with that, five analog and eight digital. With the little antenna on my desk I get three digital channels and none of the analog but if I move around I can get as many as five digital channels.

This does not mean it doesn't work, I have a solid house with slat and plaster walls and two large buildings on each side, one steel sided. Television reception from an indoor antenna is going to be passable at best so I use an antenna on the roof of my garage and get pretty good reception for my area.

The PCTV Pro Stick does a good job of getting reception using just the small antenna and works great with my outdoor antenna for my area. Installation of the drivers and TVCenter Pro program for handling the DVR functions as well as the television viewing is simple and takes a few minutes.