Decent capture cards?

[Zacabeb]

I figure some people here have dwelled into the world of capture cards - and I wish for your advice.

At this time, I have an ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon and I'm attempting to use it just for capturing still images. That's all I'm trying to do. Nothing else, just that. And I am not satisfied.

Capturing straight to the clipboard, the card applies its primitive de-interlacing, which ATi deliberately made impossible to turn off, for reasons of evil. I don't know how their latest drivers handle it, because the last time I tried to install new drivers I ended up having to reformat the hard disk. I'm running oldies now.

Then I tried capturing to 1fps AVI clips, but I cannot find a codec that does not use any form of compression. Either they use DCT or reduce color depth. Not surprisingly, none of them were made with the purpose of capturing stills in mind and they're all useless for it.

My current PC is old and I have decided that in my next system, there will be no compromises. No OEM, no bulk. No ATI graffy cards either; I have had enough. But I want to be able to capture stuff from outside that is not already digital.

I figured I should get a decent regular graphics card and a separate capture card, but what to get then?

I would love to have component inputs (RGBS and YPbPr), I want the ADC's and video decoder to be fairly good, and I want to have complete, divine and merciless control over absolutely everything the card does. I want to feel like a god and the card should obey my every move. It should worship and adore me.

But are there any such cards made at consumer level and if so, how heartbreakingly expensive are they?

For anyone with one of those new, fancy* All-in-Wonder Radeon's I have another question. Have ATi kept the "activity center" style interface, or did they make a 180 and make it useful? Would I be wrong in coldly turning them away for my new system?

Thanks in advance.

* Initially I wrote a word having 6 letters, beginning with s and ending with y, and it was censored. No, that's not it - what I wrote was a nice word, but by chance, containing within it another word that is not so nice, yet not among the worst. Can you figure it out?

I use Matrox's RT.2000 system. At about £1000 it aint cheap

it comes with (well it did then - is now rt.2500)

Matrox Millenium G400 AGP Graphics Card
Matrox RT.2000 PCI Capture Card

The G400 and the RT2000 plug together internally and externally and a feed goes off to the monitor.

It has a break out box for composite, sound, and S-Video - both in and out.

On board it has firewire ports.

it comes iwth full versio of Adobe Premier 5.1c

There is a cheaper version http://www.matrox.com/video/products/rtx10/capture.cfm

I think thats around the £500 mark.

In my Analugue Hi-8 days I used Pinnacle's (then Miro) DC30. It came with premier and a PCI card etc etc.

the latest flavour is the DC10plus http://www.pinnaclesys.com/ProductPa...=2&Langue_ID=2

[dnrc]

Then I tried capturing to 1fps AVI clips, but I cannot find a codec that does not use any form of compression. Either they use DCT or reduce color depth. Not surprisingly, none of them were made with the purpose of capturing stills in mind and they're all useless for it.

Have you considered doing this using avi_io and Huffyuv, it may work and Huffy is a lossless codec (You could even use uncompressed AVI frames which AVI_IO also allows)