2 Qs - chipset and noise, and about the Pinnacle DCx0

[Z-C]

Hi all.

First question - Which chipset is the best? as I've read the cx2388x chipset is the newest and uses 10bit/pixel. Does this makes it best quality?
One more thing - I've read a post saying that when capturing from old VHS tapes I'm actually better off with the old BT878 chipset, as noise is less seen with this chipset. Is this true? I am mostly going to capture old VHS tapes.

Second question - I heard the DC10/20/30 (etc..) are considered a high end capture cards. I was surprised to see on this site that they cost only 50-100$ like cheap cards.
After checking some online stores I saw that the DC10 Plus actually goes for like 200$. And the others for more. How's that? Are the records on this website wrong?

Thanks for any help given!

[edDV]

Hi all.

Second question - I heard the DC10/20/30 (etc..) are considered a high end capture cards. I was surprised to see on this site that they cost only 50-100$ like cheap cards.
After checking some online stores I saw that the DC10 Plus actually goes for like 200$. And the others for more. How's that? Are the records on this website wrong?

Thanks for any help given!

I've had a DC-30plus for years. Cost me $900 on sale at Fry's It's a motion JPeg (MJPEG) card that tops out around 7-8MB/sec at highest quality and at that rate, quality is very good. In the old days (pre-ATA33) this meant a RAID and a pair of $400-700 SCSI disks. A single ATA-33 drive could manage maybe 4-6 MB/sec for OK quality.

I stopped using it when Pinnacle and Adobe refused to do drivers for Premiere 6. I got a DV cam and never turned back. DV at 3.6 MB/s trippled my disk capacity at similar quality. Also ATA-66 and then ATA-100 drives could handle DV without a RAID.

That's a bit of history and context for this card. How times have changed.

Any driver support for this card would be 3rd party. Single capture hard drive's can now handle 7-8MB/s with ease.

see http://www.mirosupport.de/
http://www.pinnaclesys.com/support/miroVideo/DC30/UserManuals/dc30_e.pdf

The card is built around the Zoran ZR36050
http://avmaster.bnx.homelinux.net/datasheets/zr36050.pdf