Affordable Quality (?) External Video Scalers

[John LaCava]

I have found two video scalers which profess to be quality products and at very reasonable prices, between $300 and $500, depending on where you buy.

One is AVT-3000, there is a reasonable amount of info on this item through a google search. Lowest price I found was $350 USD. Waiting to find out if it has 2:2 pull down detection as this is important for me in region 2 (PAL).

Other one is the Zinwell Bright-View. Less infor on this one. Though what is there seems to sound promising, a bit more expensive, lowest price I could find was $450 USD, this definately has 2:2 pulldown detection.

If anyone has any info about either please share. If the zinwell isn't better I'll save myself $100 and get the AVT-3000.

Cheers,
John

[George Bellefontaine]

Sorry, John, I haven't heard of either. Perhaps Jon knows something about them.




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[Andrew Pratt]

The Iscan models are the ones I see most often talked about...but that's about the extent of my knowledge on the subject

[John LaCava]

Turns out they are the same. Both are manufactured by Zinwell, but the AVT-3700 is made for AV Tools and put in a different casing. Internally they are identical!

I'm gonna save the $100.

I'll let ya know if its any good when I get it home.

Cheers,
J

[George Bellefontaine]

Good luck, John.




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[SteveG]

This scaler is the subject of an interesting review by Stacey Spears and Don Munsil. It has great promise for the price, but some severe problems:

http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/cgi-bin/shootout.cgi?function=search&articles=5#ZinewellBrite-View

Steve Goff

[Andrew Pratt]

steve I edited your hyperlink to make it "clickable" all you need to do to make that happen is highlight your URL then press the URL button above and it will wrap some code around it to make it work....

[JonMarsh]

It sounds to me like this is a product for which the core chip may be developed more for the requirements of RGBHV with component output as an afterthough. For those using graphics grade displays or presentation monitors, this wouldn't be any problem. For HDTV component inputs, I don't think this would be the product to get.

The Zinwell site has essentially NO infomation on it about the product- technical or otherwise. Doesn't even give barebones specs. Very odd.

AVToolbox has a fair amount of info:

http://www.avtoolbox.com/avt-3700.htm

Although the specs list only standard PC resolutions for VGA/RGB output, since component vs. RGB appears to be controlled by a back panel switch, it's probably possible to go to 720P or 1080i in RGB mode. THAT is interesting....





-Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....

[SteveG]

Thanks, Andrew, I thought I'd done that. This box is based on a single chip, the Trident DPTV 3dPro, that does video decoding, deinterlacing, scaling, and reencoding. Stacey says it does most of this very well indeed, though its video deinterlacing is not up to the quality of the Faroudja/Sage/Genesis Micro FLI2200 and FLI2300. As an aside, Faroudja's DCDi circuit looks for diagonal lines and does its sampling for interpolation/filtering on the perpendicular to the diagonal. Some believe that it must loose some resolution, but it does it on a per pixel basis, and any loss is hard to see or nonexistant.




Steve Goff