How useful is a DCTV

[Ral-Clan]

Hi, I was just given a DCTV (not a CDTV) 24 bit graphixy box in a pile of Amiga stuff.  It's a box that goes between your Amiga's RGB port and monitor, and can display images in pseudo 24-bit colour, but only with programs that have the ability to output to it. (seems like most of the good graphics software had 'drivers' for it).

http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=282

It also can capture still colour images from a video source (but it's very slow at this).

For those who have a DCTV, how useful is something like this nowadays?  Now that we have RTG graphics cards, scanners, digital cameras, etc.

I read all the old reviews, and in the mid-90s, people generally seemed to love it.  Apparently, it was very good for the price.  It seems like some people did some commercial type work with it too.

I noticed now, though, they seem to be generally unwanted - going for $5 on Ebay or not selling at all.

I already have a nice A2000 with Picasso II as my main Amiga, but I'm thinking this little DCTV could breath new life into an old A500 setup....actually making it useful for doing some semi-serious graphics work.  Like lo-res (640x480) art and animations, etc.

Anyone have any experiences with this or comments?

How does it like OS3.x?

[Ral-Clan]

Great!  Sounds like the DCTV is something I want to keep then rather than sell.  I think it could make an Amiga 500 a nice little true-colour graphics workstation for simple 2D bitmap stuff and animation work.

Good to see that after all these years people still love this product.  Honestly, all the reviews I found for it on the web were very positive.

As for the framegrabbing part....I probably won't use it much, but if I do then I'd probably just grab images from the NTSC video output of my digital camera.

Thanks for the opinions!

[Ral-Clan]

Those screen grabs don't look bad at all - especially considering this is 1991 era hardware.  I can see why it was so popular at the time.

Just a question: I ALREADY have an internal (videoslot) scandoubler and Picasso II graphics card on my A2000.  Will this conflict with the DCTV (I don't plan to use the DCTV with this computer, but I want to test it with this A2000 as I don't have the space to set up an A500 for it yet).

i.e. with this setup is there still a video signal going to the old RGB monitor port on my A2000?

With this setup I normally boot to an 800x600 16-bit Workbench screen.  What would happen if I ALSO had an old 1084 monitor hooked up to the RGB port at the same time?   I assume the same 16-bit 800x600 signal would also be sent to the RGB port and could fry my 1084.  Or does RTG software like Cybergraphix totally shut off output to the old RGB port and re-direct it to the graphics card when high scan rates like this are run?

If I plan to test the DCTV by temporarily hooking it and my old 1084 to my normally unused RGB port, will I fry them both when my Amiga starts up in 800x600 (or higher).

So how does this all work?  Since I went scandoubler/RTG I've never used the old monitor port.

Thanks.