The really great thing about over-the-air (OTA) digital HDTV is that it'll give you a better signal than you'll ever get with cable or satellite, and it's free. The only real problem is getting good reception, and getting the picture onto a screen in your home.

If you've got a new HDTV, you already have a digital tuner. Just plug the antenna in and you're good to go. Luckily for those who don't have an HDTV but do have a decent computer and monitor, Pinnacle's PCTV HD Stick is a fairly cheap solution that's simple to set up. For under $100 and the sacrifice of a single USB port, it will turn your PC into an HDTV, a standard definition digital TV, and (for the year and a half or so that it's still around), you'll be able to get analog TV as well. All that, and you get decent PVR (personal video recorder) functions too.

This is a sweet deal for getting HDTV on the cheap, but quality will vary a lot depending on where you live, the type of antenna you hook up, and how new your computer is. Unfortunately, the packaged antenna that Pinnacle includes with this version of its HD Stick is three kinds of useless: It's all of 4 inches long, the cable that it's permanently attached to is only about 3 feet long, and the magnetic base might seem like a good idea at first, until you realize that this device is meant to travel with your laptop, or stick close to your PC. In case you don't know, magnets and computer parts don't mix well.

If you want to get decent reception, you'll have to head to an electronics store for a better antenna. The one included with the slightly more expensive HD Stick Pro is a little better (it's telescoping and much longer), but unless you live on a large hill in the middle of a big city, with no trees or other buildings to interfere, you're going to need an outdoor antenna to get any real, worthwhile reception. In our 11th-floor, midtown Manhattan office, Pinnacle's dinky antenna managed to snag about ten digital channels once I found a way to get the antenna high enough. Not all of them were watchable, because the signal tends to cut in and out. The HD Stick also managed to pick up a handful of severely snowy analog stations. But at my home in an outer borough, with a $25 outdoor antenna, the Pinnacle HD Stick picked up plenty of stations, including the four networks and PBS in HD. You can check antennaweb.org to get a fairly clear idea of what to expect in your area with a similar setup.

Pinnacle advertises the HD Stick mostly as a travel-with-your-laptop solution, though. And for that, it's not likely to be a satisfactory solution, as reception isn't going to be great with an indoor antenna unless you happen to be in an ideal location. For traveling, I'd recommend Pinnacle's HDTV To Go HD Wireless box, hooked up directly to your cable or satellite receiver. Although at $249, it's a far more expensive solution, it'll let you access all your TV content, even from your home PVR, wherever you have your laptop and WiFi.

Recommended specs for running the HD Stick on a laptop are a 1.8-GHz Pentium M, and for the PC at least a Pentium 4 2.4-Ghz CPU and 1GB of RAM for HD viewing. A number of users with borderline systems have complained online about audio sync problems, and if you're recording something, it'll bog down your system even more.

The software is pretty solid, but has some minor issues. If your reception for a specific channel is poor, changing from one station to the next can hang for a number of seconds. But a lot of that seems to have to do with digital TV tuners in general, as my HDTV does the same thing. On rare occasions, an image will stick on-screen when you're changing channels, but a quick close and relaunch of the software takes less than 10 seconds.

Overall, the Pinnacle HD Stick is a great, low-cost, simple way to get HD and SD TV onto your PC. Just plug it in, install the software, and you're good to go. It's not a great portable TV solution though, which is, oddly, what the company seems to be marketing it for. Pinnacle sells a slightly older HD Stick Pro model that comes with a remote and a better antenna. Considering that in retail stores, the price difference between the two is around $10, it's probably wise to go the Pro route. Both options are available now.

If you don't have an HDTV, this is the simplest and cheapest way to get high-definition television into your life. And even if you have HD cable or satellite, an over-the-air solution such as this will offer a slightly better picture, because there's no compression involved. For those who remember the days when PC TV tuners came on bulky internal PC cards and included buggy software, this is quite an improvement.

Post by Matt Safford