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some of those HD ones though cannot receive regular non HD channels very well (when using a off air antenna)
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Actually, EDTV (480p) is about 1/4 or 1/2 the bitrate of HDTV (1080i or 720p). If it could handle HDTV, EDTV would be a piece of cake.
Note that the cheap cards (at least those that actually use a hardware DSP) can attain the same quality as more expensive cards. All the cards do is take data from the signal and decode it. A more expensive card may fare better with a weak signal, use less CPU, or not drop packets as frequently, but that may or may not be important, depending on what you want.
Do, however, stay away from the really cheap cards. More often than not, they're little more than a RF front end and an A/D converter on a card, without a DSP. In other words, they use the CPU as the DSP, and it works very poorly at that. (Remember those winmodems?) They're great for experimenters who want to play around with high speed A/Ds connected to their PCs, but not very good for the intended purpose.