Somewhere in the capturing forum at http://www.vcdhelp.com a person that works for Pinnacle stated that PCTV Pro is not able to capture more than 240 lines (NTSC). That seemed strange to me because I now that the BT878 chip (on which PCTV is based on) is capable of much more. The only explanation could be that the driver provided by Pinnacle will constrain you to 240 lines. With that in mind I performed the following tests. First I captured a short sequence from my Hi8 analog camcorder using VirtualDub and my old Hauppage WinTV card. I set the resolution to 352x480 (as I usually do). Examining the AVI file, one could easily see interlacing artifacts due to the fact that both fields of a frame were captured - look at the hand. Then, I used the PCTV card in the same experimental setup. Looking at the same frame the interlacing artifacts were much milder almost inexistent (also the colors look worse and the black border at the bottom of the picture is much larger). The
next step was to install the WDM capture drivers together with iuVCR. I took another capture using the Pinnacle PCTV card and the interlacing artifacts were back into picture.

My conclusion: the PCTV card is able to capture both fields of a frame, but the drivers provided by Pinnacle will not allow you to do so. Marketing decision I guess.

Note: the hyperlinks above point to some files stored on a geocities account and will not work directly. However, I discovered that, if you add a blank to the end of the URL in the newly opened browser window, the picture can be loaded.