CompuServe Thread

It comes with digipaint,a hires dvtv true color paint ppogram,dctv anims can be made from almost any amiga anim program.It digitizes a 640×200 or 640×256 screen,maybe supports lacing.the average fils size of a dctv file is from 76k to200k it has a 3 bitplane modewhich is smaller in size gives 2million color output,prone to banding and color bleeding,a 4bitplane mode with 4million colors which are larger but less banding,color bleeds,etc.THey reccomend 5mb of ram total a minimum of 1 mb ram to use.It plugs into your rgb port to display out to a composite output,it plugs into your serial port to digitize images.digital creations sold a rgb adapter for simultaneous viewing on a rgb monitor and use with a genlock for around 200 dollars

Dan, DCTV does not capture moving video. It is a slow scan digitizer (approx. 5 to 10 seconds) so if you have a rock solid freeze frame VCR you can scan video frame stills. It is a very low cost method for working with 24bit images although the output is composite at a little less than 24bit quality. It will load 24bit images and convert them to DCTV format or most other Amiga resolutions. The nice feature of DCTV is that the format is no larger than a 16 color high resolution picture and most anim players can use DCTV images transparently at high frame rates. I digitize with my camcorder and it works quite well for still objects (Kids can't keep still for even 5 to 10 seconds, take their picture and digitize that). David (75714,2776)

DCTV will capture very well from a camera, but with tape there could be a problem. Each scanline has to be 62.5 microseconds long(I think), anyway all the lines of the picture MUST be of equal length or you could get a 'torn picture'. Thats what timebase correctors are for. DCTV has built-in software timebase correcting. Also you have to disable accelerator caches(I forget which one). Since DCTV's output is NTSC, you could get sone AWFUL<eccch!> 'artifacting' with some kinds of pictures, and the colors are matched to the NTSC stand and are not true 24-bit. Did you know that NTSC means "Never the Same Color Twice"?<g> But with many pictures the quality is very good. I won't knock DCTV; I have one myself and used it with a 15-year old color video camera (Panasonic PK800)and was very pleased with it.

Hi Dan – If you find that the DCTV will work for you, we have a used one in inventory. Drop me a CMail note and I'll give you the particulars. Hank Videology, Inc Where you always get P.O.M.P. and Service under all circumstances