The OmniChrome card is S3's attempt at taking on ATI's All-In-Wonder cards at the lower end of the market. HEXUS.net have a review of the card, finding the TV tuning to be good, along with some nice features such as HDTV input/output and reasonable 3D performance. However, it has quite a few downsides, such as a lack of multi-sampling AA, mono audio tuning and a PCB too big to fit in SFF cases such as Shuttle's XPCs. S3's Product Marketing Manager, Nadeem Mohammad, was given the opportunity to respond to the review.
"Overall, S3 still need to do some serious work with OmniChrome to bring it up to scratch. If you can suffer the downsides, great; it's cheap and does the basic TV-tuning-with-good-softwre-and-remote job fine. But those downsides are pretty dire in a 2004 TV tuning product. HDTV input and output don't save it for me. If you have the basic facility to actually record or watch HDTV signals properly, you've got the need for something more than mono audio from the TV tuner."
"Overall, S3 still need to do some serious work with OmniChrome to bring it up to scratch. If you can suffer the downsides, great; it's cheap and does the basic TV-tuning-with-good-softwre-and-remote job fine. But those downsides are pretty dire in a 2004 TV tuning product. HDTV input and output don't save it for me. If you have the basic facility to actually record or watch HDTV signals properly, you've got the need for something more than mono audio from the TV tuner."
