Pinnacle Systems 210100316 Dazzle DVC 80 USB Video Capture Device

I brought this home and had it up and running pretty quickly. I didn't experience problems transferring video from a VCR to my computer.

So why one star?

Well, I feel the box and their ads are misleading. The DVC 80 can only capture video in AVI format, with dimensions of 360 x 240, about half the size of of a TV screen. There is no mention of this anywhere in the minimal documentation that comes with the item. I thought I was doing something wrong, and tried to get in touch with customer service, but the wait on the phone was too long. I finally got an email to them, and their only response was that if I wanted MPEG-2, or a resolution of 720 x 480, I should have bought the DVC 150. It would have been nice to know that before I put out my money.

I bought this to convert family VHS tapes to DVD format. The problem is that it limits the capture to a very small screen size (I am not a techie) that is roughly 1/4 of my 17 inch monitor screen. When I burned my first DVD and put it on my home system the picture was really rough poor resolution. My main complaint is there is no mention of this on the box so I got burned for $70. It was a complete waste of money for my purposes!

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Packaged software crashed every time. Tried to upgrade from the website...poorest customer service since the old days of Apple. I have had this thing for over a year and have only been able to transfer about 15 minutes of tiny screen size video. This was a waste of my money. Save yourself the headache. I'll get more satisfaction cramming this device down the garbage disposal than I ever did transferring videos of my children.

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First of all I bought it about a year ago. And I tried to burn the cds on my system which is a dell PIII 700 MHz, with 512 MB ram and win2000 OS. For some reason it used to get stuck when I am trying to created the VCD after rendering the movie and creating the mpeg file. I thought may be something wrong with my system. So I upgraded to dell P4 2.4 GHz, with 768 MB ram and Windows XP home. Now when I try to install the hardware, I get the windows blue screen. The error is some kind of problem with security and authorization. I go on to the dazzle website and try to download any patches. In this process I am asked to register, and rightly so I try to register. Guess what! the site throws invalid number error, so cannot register. So going with the only choice I have, I override everything on XP and install the hardware. Now capture the movie from my VCR again. This time I dint get any audio and the movie is in snaps as opposed to a smooth roll of the scenes. I am still trying to convert this cassette to a VCD. Apart from this burning a movie takes about 8 hrs. To top it off did I forget to mention that I am trying to convert one casette to a VCD for the past one year with this equpmment... :-).

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Im not sure about the features and software as I could never get the product to work. The packaged software MovieStar crashed on start up everytime. I tried using other programs to capture, and no input was detected. When I tried to install the latest drivers for the product the installation froze each time. Average size AV cables (I tried two different sets)do not sit firmly in the device's inputs. The PC I am using is brand new and well above the minimum specifications and running XP. In case you havnt read it elsewhere, customer support is...well just don't bother, no toll free line, and outrageous wait time. E-mail responses are unhelpful at best.

Overall just dont bother with this product. Two thumbs down...way down