Datavideo DAC100 Video Converter Review

Its finally happened, I have actually found the time to rewrite this review after the original was trashed by my Panther installation nightmare, together with 212GB of other stuff, and yes all this happened just this review, plus a few others where due to be published.

OK enough of the "Apple Bashing" now down to the Datavideo DAC-100, so starting with a brief overview of what it is, does, looks like etc, then moving onto the testing.

The DAC-100 is a Firewire device thats able to take full frame PAL or NTSC analog video and convert it into digital video at 25Mbps (DV25), and back again, all in real time, complete with 12 or 16bit audio.

Yes there are many devices on the market that all claim to do the same thing, ranging in price from less than $100 to more than $10000 for professional converters. The DAC-100 sits close to the bottom of this range, but this should not be taken as any indication of poor quality or bad performance.

What makes this converter stand out from the rest in its price range, is the flexibility it offers, with bi-directional operation, analog I/O via composite and Svideo ports, and switchable audio sampling. With all of the others I looked at, most could offer some of these features, others all but at a higher price, still more missed the dual standard support etc.

Supplied bits

Now this being a external Firewire device, it came with no software of any variety (more on that later), but it did come with; Firewire cable, combined AV cable, Svideo cable, power supply and one of the smallest manuals I have seen in a while.

Its gripe time, but nothing too bad!. The supplied AV cable is, put simply "crap" its thin, short and actually worse than some that you get with consumer VCRs, and yes, before anyone emails, I know the DAC-100 is not a professional device, but still I would have expected better, especially given the quality of the other bits.

Quick visual tour

A picture is worth a thousand words, so rather than waffle on, here is the DAC-100 from the front which showing the audio/video inputs (both composite and Svideo) plus one Firewire port. On the top are two push buttons, these control the audio sample rate (12 or 16bit) and the mode of operation (encode/decode).

Now moving onto the back, which as you can see in the image, has the same Svideo and composite ports as the front, these are just for video/audio out, in addition to these is another Firewire port, power port, switch and configuration dip switches.

Testing

I have had the DAC-100 for several months now, and in all that time have really hammered it, one interesting example being when I "forgot" to shut down after capturing broadcast TV, and ended up with a little over 18 hours of video, that ate some 200GB of disk. Whats really impressive about this, is the lack of any sign of "Time Code" problems, which was a pleasant surprise, as thats something I was expecting to see, especially with really long captures.

Anyway down to the tests I actually intended to do.

Test 1 (Broadcast TV Capture)

In this first test, my test environment consisted of the DAC-100 using a 5 year old, very well used consumer VCR (Sony SLV-EZ9) as the video source, and my Apple Powerbook G4 running iMovie 3.03 as the capture target, with no other Firewire devices attached, or other apps running during the capture. All connections where made with the supplied cables.

Using this setup I captured 60 seconds of morning TV, which produced a file of a little over 210MB, now that may seem excessive for such a short capture but no its about right, given the 3.5MB bitrate of the DV25 format used by the DAC100. And yes that does mean that one hour of capture would be approximately 13GB.

Now I have a short raw capture, time to extract a random frame to JPEG, and see just how good, or otherwise it is. So after some fiddling with iMovie, here it is resized to fit on this page, with the full version available by clicking enlarge.

In this next shot, I just cropped a small area of the full frame, which serves to show the actual capture quality produced by the DAC-100.

I leave you to make up your own mind as to the quality of these captures, but be aware that this is dependent on a number of factors other than the actual converter used, for example, the video source, cables, software and loading of the machine used.

To me, this is actually better quality than I expected from a low end converter, especially when the video source and poor quality cables are taken into account.

Test 2 (VHS conversion)

This next test is more likely the sort of thing this converter will be used for, converting VHS tapes into digital form, for later MPEG encoding. My test setup is unchanged, with the exception of this time I used a 4 year old and well used, pre-recorded shop bought tape as the video source.

After capturing the whole movie "Babylon 5, Third Space", I had a 20GB DV file, from which to extract a random frame to JPEG. So after yet more fiddling with iMovie, here it is resized to fit on this page, with the full version available by clicking enlarge.

Before making up your mind about the capture quality you are strongly advised to look at the full size frame. I say this as the above thumb nail, just like all the others has been resized which will make it look better than it actually is.

Looking at the full frame, you will see a fair amount of noise, some minor color saturation issues, plus minor distortion especially at the bottom of the frame. As for how much of this is down to the DAC-100, and not the actual video source, well thats the $64K question, which you will get a different answer from everyone you asked.

My answer to this one is, that the capture quality is affected by many different factors, with the common ones for VHS conversions being.

• Resolution of the video source (352x288 in this case).
• Quality of the video playback hardware (The VCR).
• Age of the tape used.
• Generation of the tape (How many times its been copied).
• Quality and length of cables.

Closing Words

For a converter in this price range I was not expecting anything beyond average, in terms of video quality or even functionality, and was expecting "Time Code Issues".

The reality was a pleasant surprise, not a sign of any "Time Code" errors, video quality that I would call "Excellent", far better than any analog capture card I have come across, and even better than some of the other higher priced converters I have used in the past.

Now for the gripes, which are minor, but still need discussion. The first as mentioned earlier is the less than wonderful quality of the supplied cables, the second is the lack of any integrated "Time Base Correction" (TBC) which is something that I would have liked to see in a converter, thats going to be used for VHS - Digital transfers, by the majority of those who buy them.

The final gripe is a strange one. Now the DAC-100 has dual Firewire ports, so I was expecting to be able to daisy chain it with other Firewire devices, in just the same way as just about every other Firewire device I have used. But no, not in this case, when I tried it, nothing further down the chain than the converter would function or even be detected. As for why they did this, no ideas, its one of those annoying things that seem to be creeping into more hardware these days. Anyone with any ideas on why they did not allow daisy chaining, please let me know.

At some point I will get a TBC, very likely a Datavideo one, and update this page to show the difference it makes, using the same video source.

Highly Recommended.