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Review Date: Wed, February 4, 2004
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Recommended: Yes |
Price paid: $55.50
| Rating: 8
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Pros:
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Easy to set up, good quality video
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Cons:
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buggy software on CD (had to download newer versions)
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I must say that for the price I was impressed by this capture card. The video quality is great - about as good as it gets with S-Video inputs. S-Video supports slightly better than VHS resolution (not as good as DVD) so it's great for ripping those old VHS movies to DVD (or hard disk storage).
The software that came on CD caused blue screens on two different PCs I tried! I downloaded the updated version of the software and everything worked fine after that. I bought mine in November 2003, so hopefully by now the software on CD works. Might want to download the newer versions anyway though just in case.
The remote works quite well, and performs all necessary operations for recording and playback.
Picture in Picture isn't exactly what it seems. It doesn't show 2 live channels at once - one of the pictures must be pre-recorded (a file from your hard disk). Marketing at work here. :P
Before I bought a digital camcorder I used this capture card to make in-game videos. My gaming PC has an S-Video (SVHS) output on its video card. I connected this output to the capture card's input (on another computer). The advantage of using 2 computers is that no frames are dropped while playing games - all video recording is done on a separate computer. I'll admit it wasn't a snap to get everything working, but the results were quite nice. I tried Camtasia studio instead of the default Winfast recording software with good results. The Winfast recording software seemed to work fine though.
Overall, I think the best use for this capture card is watching TV (or listening to FM radio, which I never attempted). It works fine for capturing video from an external source, but now I prefer recording to miniDV (much less hassle).
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;)
;)
;)