-Adam
 

For UK£150 you're not going to get broadcast quality, but capturing from S-VHS and rendering the stream as PAL DVD-compatible MPEG-2 (at 9.8mbit) the resulting files look, IMHO, almost as good as the original S-VHS cassette projected on a 6-foot across screen.

My only gripes with it are (i) it is quite resource-hungry - I'm using an AMD XP1900+ processor with 1gb of SDRAM and W2KSP2, and that's only just enough to capture uncompressed 720x526 AVI files without dropping frames - and (ii) that it's not compatible with Adobe Premiere. In order to use Premiere for editing you have to capture as AVI using the software which comes with the card, and then import the resulting files.

But for what it does relative to the price, I think the card was excellent value.

One afterthought on the ATI card: I did have a massive hassle with drivers when I first installed it. The drivers which came with the card did not allow the video capture hardware to be recognised by W2K (i.e. it only allowed the card to work as a display adapter); I then downloaded a newer version which fixed this problem but introduced several new ones.

It wasn't until two releases of the driver later that the thing finally worked perfectly with no glitches.

But, when you think that broadcast-standard analogue capture cards start at around UK£500 (e.g. the Matrox 2500), the fact that the captured video from this one looks not far off it means that for £150, I'm prepared to forgive ATI over the driver hassle.

In short, then, my experience with ATI hardware is that it performs extremely well for what it costs, but be prepared for some mieowing and hissing over installation and if you want to use proper editing software you will have to capture using the bundled stuff first.

The other thing UK users have to remember to do is to install the patch for DirectX8.0a which allows it to recognise PAL video. I've never tried DirectX8.1 on the basis that 8.0a plus the patch works and is stable: i.e. it ain't broke and thus does not need fixing.

I agree, you shouldn't have to faff about installing umpteen versions of a device driver just to get a bit of hardware to work properly (he said, in anticipation of gloating comments from Mac users reading this), but this did solve all the problems for me. I guess that when I bought the card it was a pretty new product, and because only a small proportion of people buying them were likely to be using W2K (or any other NT-based OS), ATI didn't initially put as much care and effort into producing the W2K drivers as they did for the W9X versions.

For digital photos I use a compact Super VHS Camcorder and have a VCR attached to the input of the TNT card. I can take unlimited 640 x 480 resolution photos, and capture them off the TNT card at my leisure, making sure I capture exactly the right moment. I can't understand why people spend big bucks for the lower resolution dedicated digital cameras such as the Mavica. For less money, this setup has much more capability and no battery hog problems.

These batteries are awesome. They outlast the best alkalines by about 4-to-1 in my Kodak DC-280. Which by the way is a great little camera as long as there's adequate light. 2.1 megapixel. I often look for excuses to buy a newer/better camera but can't really come up with a reason to replace it.