How useful is a DCTV

[mr_a500]

DCTV is the second best thing I've ever bought for my A500 (the first being Viper 520). I love it. The software is very well written and works perfectly in all Workbench versions from 1.3 to 3.9 (I never tried in 1.0 to 1.2). I've never ever had a crash with DCTV software no matter what patch or configuration I used. DCTV Paint is probably the best Amiga paint program I ever used.

DCTV 24-bit output is composite, not RGB meaning it can't be used to display Workbench or application screens.  Composite is a bit blurry for things like text or fine detail (use dynamic hi-res instead). My main use for DCTV is to display images downloaded from the internet (certainly better than HAM) and to scan still images from DVD or a video camera pointed at a picture or still object (like a scanner). Scan speed is pretty slow and it's important that the image is still or you get a screwed-up image.

DCTV was meant to be used with Commodore 1084 monitor which allows you to easily switch between composite and RGB - otherwise you need a TV or composite monitor to display the DCTV images. 24-bit DCTV files (which are really 4-bit) are about 15% the size of a 24-bit IFF, meaning 24-bit animations are much faster.

The best programs to use with DCTV are:
ImageFX (render to DCTV - but crops at 736 pixel width)
AdPro (DCTV operator - make large DCTV images 1280x2048?)
VistaPro (render to DCTV)
JPEGonDCTV (quickly display jpeg on DCTV)
DCTV-Viewer96 (to view scrolling DCTV images larger than 736x482)

[mr_a500]

Once again, nice manual Bob! :-)

A few miscellaneous points about DCTV:

If you're scanning from DVD, you may notice that there are horizontal lines at regular intervals on the scanned image. This only happens with certain DVDs. I think it's a form of copy protection or something because it only happens on DVDs from certain movie studios.

JPEGonDCTV works best with images smaller than 736x482. Larger images are squashed to fit (looks blurry or bad aspect ratio). For large images it is best to load into ImageFX and crop the section you want (using high-res interlace preset size) then render to DCTV. The image can be viewed with any IFF viewer that opens its own screen (I like Visage). If you don't want to crop, use ADPro to convert the entire image to DCTV and DCTV-Viewer96 to view. I wish Visage could have supported scrolling DCTV, because DCTV-Viwer96 is not the greatest (written in AMOS).

GIF images can also be viewed with DCTV, but their palette must first be changed from CMAP to RGB (use ImageFX or ADpro). PNG is already in RGB format so there is no problem with that.

[mr_a500]

You can see a couple images I scanned with a video camera attached to DCTV in this post here.  In this case DCTV came in handy because I don't have a digital camera.

A few more points about DCTV:
When converting a DCTV image to JPG, GIF or PNG (like I did in the above link) you need to change the aspect ratio from NTSC (assuming NTSC DCTV) to 1:1 or it'll look squashed vertically when viewed on non-Amiga computers. Use the ADPro operator "NTSC to Square". (ImageFX also has a way to change aspect ratio, but no matter what I did, it didn't work.) Also, a DCTV scan will look a bit blurry so you need to sharpen it a bit. Usually, after changing aspect ratio, I use the Sharpen feature (set to 128) in ImageFX. If you want it really sharp, you need to halve the image size before sharpening.

(This is probably more information than you need, but maybe somebody will find this useful... or maybe not ;-))