As some of you may know from my previous posts, Immersive, Inc., has introduced a PCI video processor card featuring Faroudja’s patented DCDi processing. The HOLO3DGRAPH is designed to accept Serial Digital Interface (SDI), Component, S-Video, and Composite video inputs. It combines with your PC graphics card to turn your PC into a video processor. Included on the card are Faroudja’s deinterlacing chip, the FLI2200, a great Philips color decoder, and an FPGA for extra processing of various sorts. The card accepts standard definition sources of all sorts, process them, and then use the graphics card to scale the image to various resolutions. Included with the card is a remote control. The user interface uses a cascading menu system that offers extensive control over picture settings, resolutions, aspect ratio, and video processing parameters that can be memorized on a per input basis. It also has built in support for the Girder PC IR control program. And since the card features dual video paths, it is also compatible with open-source deinterlacing efforts of such as dScaler. The latter can use only the input capabilities of the card, or also its deinterlacing capabilities. And once Microsoft ships DirectX 9.0, additional deinterlacing choices built into many of the newer graphics cards will become available.
I have been one of the beta testers of the card, and we testers have recently been released from our NDA. I have had extensive experience with video processors, having worked with many and owned processors from Faroudja, Dwin, and Focus Enhancements. I evaluated the card with a 19 inch Sony Trinitron computer monitor and my NEC XG85 projector. This card in a very modest PC produces the best image I have seen on DVD, short of the $45,000-65,000 Teranex processor. It has the benefits of Faroudja deinterlacing without the problems and shortcomings of the various Faroudja boxes I’ve used. While PC DVD playback is usually quite good for material originating on film, it is less good on video-based material. This card produces the best picture I’ve seen on video-based material, undoubtedly because of the DCDi processing. The card also has very clean, low noise analog inputs, far superior to any computer capture card. In part this is because its ADCs sample at the correct rate for DVD. Amazingly, using the SDI connection, Cliff Watson has verified that the card has less high frequency rolloff than a PC internal DVD player using the Theatertek player.
The card is not cheap, at $895, but compared to a video processor, the price seems reasonable to me. It offers better performance than any reasonably priced processor I’ve seen. Highly recommended.
Steve Goff
I have been one of the beta testers of the card, and we testers have recently been released from our NDA. I have had extensive experience with video processors, having worked with many and owned processors from Faroudja, Dwin, and Focus Enhancements. I evaluated the card with a 19 inch Sony Trinitron computer monitor and my NEC XG85 projector. This card in a very modest PC produces the best image I have seen on DVD, short of the $45,000-65,000 Teranex processor. It has the benefits of Faroudja deinterlacing without the problems and shortcomings of the various Faroudja boxes I’ve used. While PC DVD playback is usually quite good for material originating on film, it is less good on video-based material. This card produces the best picture I’ve seen on video-based material, undoubtedly because of the DCDi processing. The card also has very clean, low noise analog inputs, far superior to any computer capture card. In part this is because its ADCs sample at the correct rate for DVD. Amazingly, using the SDI connection, Cliff Watson has verified that the card has less high frequency rolloff than a PC internal DVD player using the Theatertek player.
The card is not cheap, at $895, but compared to a video processor, the price seems reasonable to me. It offers better performance than any reasonably priced processor I’ve seen. Highly recommended.
Steve Goff
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