@dougal
"Why would a 150 Euro SD/FF be better than a 250 Euro full RTG Gfx card/SD/FF? "
Price doesn't always reflect the end user value, primarily the break point of demand and supply.
Facts:
1. You're comparing 2 products from a large time distance, well over 10 years.
From IT standpoint it's something like comparing Pentium MMX 200 with Core 2 Duo. Almost all electronic components used in PIV are no longer produced, procured or being ROHS compliant (an important condition for Euro-zone); on contrast, Indivison has current, off-the shelf components which provide physical shrinking enough to fit to all Amiga models.
2. Indivision (ECS even more) is direct result of Amiga chipset reverse engineering. A lot of custom fine tuning and tweaking is done in order to provide the currently best possible image quality. Most of PIV features including pros/cons are either present in current production Indivision or a projected feature for some time ahead. Raw power used in all 11 FPGA cores outclass overall PIV by large fraction.
3. Indivision is designed with LCD as primary display interface. There are some inherent disadvantages (scrolling, tearing) which limit it's superior performance to specific range of LCD monitors (50Hh vertical refresh). PIV had no such limitations. But even with that in mind, Indivision ECS can provide vertical refresh of 75Hh, maybe even 100Hz in case of LCD ready to accept that input. So that can be a sort of unleashed potential, I guess.
4. At the end, altough Indivision ECS is currently only a SD/FF, it might also became a RTG. Also, it had already shown dual-head capability in stacked configuration. For that and other fact, the price difference between those 2 can only be less important.
It all bounds to a personal preference, what do you want to do with your Amiga.
Regards.
