Digital TV Goes Mainstream: TV Wonder 650 Review- Page 5/6
October 13, 2006
By
Thomas Soderstrom
General Capture Capability
The remaining still shots compare an original DVD frame to those captured from the TV Wonder 650's S-Video, Composite video and RF inputs, using a Panasonic DVD-RV31 player as the source. Optimal RF signal strength was achieved by feeding the DVD player's Composite signal through the RF modulator of a Sharp VC-H810 VCR. The following images are once again shown at full resolution, cropped, from a 4:3 movie (blame the studio for the stretched appearance).
The original shot (above) looks just a little dark, with fine details around slow-moving objects like the hair and just a little bit of blur around fast moving object like the hand. Let's see how well the Theater 650 can capture this:
Theater 650 S-Video (above) loses some detail around the hair and more detail around the hand, yet still looks better-than-adequate for this mid-quality analog standard.
Theater 650 Composite Video (above) loses very little detail in comparison to S-Video: Exceptional results for this ancient, low-resolution standard.
Using RF input, the Theater 650 assumes the slightly darkened image is a result of data loss and tries to compensate. It may look nicer than the original image, but actually delivers less accuracy.