Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!agate!eris!doug
From: doug@eris (Doug Merritt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Video Products
Message-ID: <8379@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 5 Apr 88 23:47:27 GMT
References: <4834@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU>
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: doug@eris.UUCP (Doug Merritt)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 39
Keywords: desktop video reviews perfect vision

In article <4834@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU> martin@beowulf.ucsd.edu (Bruce Martin) writes:
>Has anybody had any experience with Perfect Vision?  Is it vaporware?
>How does it compare in picture quality to DigiView?  Is there any loss
>of quality using a color camera instead of a black and white one?  Is
>it compatible with an amiga 1000?

It's not vaporware...I've seen it on the shelf at HT Electronics.

There will necessarily be a loss in *potential* maximum quality
when using an NTSC color camera instead of a black and white w/ color
wheel, because NTSC has very limited color bandwidth. I wouldn't
know how close Perfect Vision comes to the optimum with the color
wheel approach.

They have two versions, one for the 1000, and one for 500 and 2000.

They claim to grab a one bit plane image in 1/60 of a second, and
imply N/60 seconds for color, where N is the number of bitplanes.

I haven't used it nor seen it in operation; I'm curious as to the
quality...it sort of sounds like the best of DigiView and LIVE!
wrapped up in one neat package.

BTW although a lot of work went into DigiView 2.0, and it produces much
better quality images than 1.0 (or than LIVE!, of course), I am still
quite disappointed in the lack of flexibility in fine tuning the results.
They very obviously did not have an image processing expert work with
them on this. To get really high quality results depends far more on
how well you pick the subject matter, and how carefully you adjust
lighting conditions, than it does on any software adjustments.
Too bad...you can do a lot with 21 bits/pixel of image information.
If you bother. Which they didn't. Other than relatively straightforward
dithering, which is necessary but not sufficient.

All of which is to say that, if the Perfect Vision folks wanted to
outdo DigiView, it would be relatively easy.

	Doug Merritt		doug@mica.berkeley.edu (ucbvax!mica!doug)
			or	ucbvax!unisoft!certes!doug