I’ve decided to return the Iiyama TFT and get an EIZO L768 instead. Amazingly the post office was not crowded with people that tried to send early christmas packages. I am really curious, if I’ll get all my money back, though, which I should according to the law.

I found a local dealer whose online system stated that they have the TFT on stock. Wrote a short email to ask them, if I could inspect the TFT before buying and they replied with no problem.

Went to the store in the afternoon and got told that they don’t have any in stock at the moment and that it would cost 15 Euros to inspect them. Was greatly disappointed and decided to order online since it was cheaper and I could return it without a problem again. Since I did not want to leave empty handed, I decided to get a digital tv card. I really did not want to buy another card from Hauppauge since their drivers just sucks. But the salesman persuaded me somehow. It is still not really common to bargain for a cheaper price in Germany, but I decided to try anyhow. After some persistent discussion, I got a 3 Euro discount. Not much, but better than nothing.

Turned out, that I was right with the driver mess. I still have an analogue tv card from Hauppauge and it seems that the tv application only supports one card at a time. It is not a big deal, since my ultimate plan is to put the digital card into my server and setup a digital vcr but it reassured my dislike of hauppauge drivers. Their newest driver from early December still crash and I don’t get any sound, so the situation is not improving. I did not buy an antenna with the card and decided to try the cheaper method: using an old aerial cable. I got a decent signal but I’ll buy a better antenna within the next days. Picture quality is really great, but switching between channels takes around 5 seconds which is too long, if your just flipping through channels.