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VidiPC 24

VidiPC 24

Manufacturer

Rombo

Appearance

length ISA card (16 bit slot only)
3 jumpers : 2 user settable for I/O address, 1 factory setup only
3 potentiometers : 2 user adjustable (black and white levels), 1 for factory use (not sealed!)

Connectors

Externally : 1 RCA video in, 1 S-video in, 1x 9 pin D sub socket for specialist RGB connection (some information given in manual)
Internally : none

Installation

Hardware

Straightforward : select free I/O address and set jumpers accordingly, fit card.

Software

One of the only systems to come with DOS-based image capture software. This was not tried but appears to be useful enough if you need this sort of facility. The Windows software was easy to install - only needing the I/O address set if it is not the default setting.

Capture times

640x544x24 3s
640x544x8g 1s

Observations

This is the only card that has user adjustable (hardware) controls for black and white levels. Whether these should be provided is probably debatable but it seemed only reasonable to set the board up properly so as to give a fair evaluation. Image quality after setting these levels was much better than that prior to fine tuning.

In addition to options for capture resolution (320x272, 640x272 and 640x544) and colour/mono selection, the software has 'panel' controls for brightness (0-100%), contrast (0-100%), colour [saturation] (0-100%) and RGB intensity ( 7 each) thus allowing a reasonable degree of image manipulation before capture.

The Windows version of this package allows images to be saved as BMP (24 bit and 8 bit greyscale) format only.

The VidiPC 24 package has a number of unusual features : a sample image to demonstrate what the system is capable of hints and tips on how to obtain good quality digitised images short discussion on video image capture and the limitations of video sources.


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