where can i buy a good quality capture card for cheap? do i need any hook ups to plug in the vcr to the capture card?

-- stephen a. garcia (garciastephen@hotmail.com), March 19, 2002

Answers

In my opinion, you get what you pay for and better quality costs more. Your idea of cheap and mine might differ too. The best generic advice I can give is decide what card you want and look for it at www.pricewatch.com. Any capture card you buy should come with cables to connect your VCR to it. VCRs are not the best source to record from as they have pretty low resolution. If you buy a cheap card, you may not like at all the results you get. I would recommend you make sure you can run a S-video cable from your VCR to your capture card for the best results. Personally, I think the Dazzle DVC II is a terrific card, but it costs over $200 US. You can get some ATI cards for $100 or less, but as one of my friends found out, cheap cards are useless should you one day want to make SVCDs or DVDs using it. The DVC II can do VCD, SVCD and DVD and would give you a lot of flexibility for the future should you want to move beyond VCD. Whatever you decide on, see if you can find a forum dedicated to the card and see what people who own it think. That's the best source of information you can possibly get.

-- Jason (Jason.Shumate@equant.com), March 19, 2002.