CompuServe Messages

[continuation] The number of our customers that use the HAM-E to go to video seems (by our best guess) to be about 5%. I have long suspected that the "go to video" segment of the market was small, and the "wanna good image" segment was large. CBM pushes video hard as can be, and the mags all jump on the bandwagon, but no one I have ever had as an "Amiga Buddy" in Florida or here (mind you, there are only about 30 Amigas in Glasgow, not counting the ones Black Belt owns) ever went to video at all. That would include about 100 people, at a guess. The HAM-E produces a beautiful image that is far better than anything the Amiga can do by itself, so it is inevitible that people who _do_ want to go to video will use it that way; and as I carefully point out, once you do, you have composite quality, which is to say, yech. :^) I hope you can imagine people who avoid composite like the plague. I'm one. I want HDTV, preferably RGB from camera to monitor, and as high a spacial resolution as I can get. I'm not holding my breath, of course. :^) One final issue. An RGB signal, by it's very nature, can change from one color to another color (any color to any color) in one pixels time, with a completely sharp edge, to the limit of the monitors dot pitch and the output DAC speed. A composite signal can make approximately 100 color changes per line of video, max, period, no matter what. Brightness changes are much better, and achieve almost 300/line. The thing that saves composite from being useless is that these 100 changes can occur anywhere on a line, with the single limit that they have to be about 1/100th away horizontally from the _last_ color change on that same line. Try drawing a blue box on a red backround in Toaster Paint and then render it to the toaster's output. You'll see an "artifact" that is approximately 1% of the toal line length, and ugly as segment registers. An RGB device, like the FireCracker or the HAM-E will render this to an RGB monitor perfectly. And _that_ is why they are superior. [continued]