Well I picked up one of these from Radio Shack. To hard to pass on the price.

I've never had one of these devices.... so I have limited experienc. And I have not been able to do too much testing.

Some info:

- Uses the LSI 8602 as people seem to know.

What the discussions seem to skip is that the Analog to Digital converion is done by a Texas Instruments 9-bit chip.

http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/tvp5150am1.html

This is the type of thing capture cards have. It certainlly feeds (from what I can tell 8-bit YCbCr 4:2:0 to the LSI chip. Other things it could be doing (and probably is) is Chroma / Luma seperation. Filtering noise from the signal. Resizing the image. Locking on the signal, doing AGC.

This is bypassed with a DV feed. So the quality of the TI ADC can probably be determined.

I would be interested to know if anyone has ever had the "jitter" problem when recording DV with a Lite-On? AKA ... is the problem due to the TI or the LSI ... or something else.

BTW:
http://www.atmel.com/products/8051/

My unit uses a microprocessor from them, and also a rom chip. <incase you want to re-write the firmware.>

------------------
I did do some quick testing. With DV input I can see the LSI does some temporal filtering at SP (2hr) mode. It is not noticable in a high-resolution still, but it is in a higher bitrate commercial DVD. So I'm guessing it is temporal. I got ~ 4000 avg where the DVD was ~7500 avg. It was very hard to tell the difference, and I'm not sure I could in a blind test.