Sager NP8886 2.8GHz Pentium 4
by Matthew Witheiler on January 21, 2003 4:56 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Features - Software
The Sager NP8886 comes with a fairly standard set of pre installed applications.
The user has a choice of operating systems from the $75.00 Windows XP Home option
to the $145.00 Windows XP Professional or Windows 2000 Professional options.
We are not used to having to pay extra for an operating system (there is no
operating system installed by default) and the option does force users to pay
more at the bottom line which is never good. At the same time this does reduce the overall system cost for those who already own an operating system or plan to use a free OS such as Linux (
Although much more basic than the refined solutions we are used to seeing in the ATI All-in-Wonder and TV-Wonder products, TV Studio did get the job done, albeit with some bumps along the way. On the whole the system worked as advertised, giving the user the ability to watch TV on the notebook, change channels using the IR remote, capture video and still pictures, ect but the problems make an external solution (such as ATI's USB Wonder) all the more attractive.
First, and perhaps most importantly, the TV quality of the TV-tuner in the NP8886 is far from the standard we have come to expect from current generation TV-tuners. Compared to the current generation All-in-Wonder products, the integrated TV-tuner in the NP8886 looks like a very immature product. As you can see in the video capture below, the video stream was constantly plagued with horizontal lines (artifacts from the deinterlacing the video).
Secondly, some of the features of TV Studio did not work as promised: Attempting to turn on closed captions resulted in an error message that read "This version does not support Closed Caption function" and trying to time shift video consistently crashed the program. Both these issues demonstrated that the product is far from up to par.
On the bright side, the basic functions of the TV-tuner system worked fine. Capturing video to MPEG2 was no problem nor was capturing still images (although in both cases the video quality remained as poor as it it is during normal TV viewing). In our opinion, if you are looking to watch television on a notebook computer we suggest you turn to a USB TV-tuner from a company already established in the business such as ATI or Hauppauge. The improvement will be well worth the extra pound or so it would add to the travel weight of the notebook.
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