Customer Reviews

Pinnacle Systems 210100316 Dazzle DVC 80 USB Video Capture Device

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

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!

I owned a dazzle product a few years back, and even then it was buggy. I wanted to get a new video capture device to do some editing at home. The one I had wanted was not available at Compusa so I picked up the Dazzle80 which was in the same price range. It never even occurred to me that the stated video quality would be so much poorer than other available products, and I didn't realize this until after I had it installed. Installation was no easy task either. It took me about an hour of fiddling with drivers and looking for files it wanted in order to be happy. The Pinnacle software that comes with it is really pretty decent, probably the only worthwhile part of the purchase. The video quality is total garbage though, it looks horrible. This thing was $70+ dollars too. Certainly not worth that when other products with much better resolution exist in the same price range. I just picked up an Xpert DVD Maker from ebay for about $30 with shipping and guess what, the quality is miles better. Dazzle, you've burned me on two purchases in a row. I can assure you, I will never purchase another Dazzle product again, and I wouldn't recommend ANYONE else to buy one of their products as well.

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.

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

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... :-).

I installed this software as instructed and then connected USB cable. My new XP computer started to perpetually reboot every few minutes. Finally I realized I could stop this by disconnecting USB Cable. I checked website and found several references to the problem by frustrated buyers. These buyers had tried a patch download which did not fix problem. Same story with me. It appeared author was not doing anything to resolve. I finally tracked down a support phone number and received a recorded message that typical wait time was 40 minutes. The video tutorial looked great but while browsing website it looked as if this software was loaded with problems. After several hours of dealing with this mess I packed everything up and hope I can get a refund.

Don't waste your money on this product. I purchased it hoping to finally transfer my VHS tapes to DVD. After a lot of effort and more good money after bad, all I can get is video and no audio. The manufacturer's website is of no help. I couldn't find an email address to get some help with this product. It doesn't surprise me, if I sold a product like this I'd avoid customer contact too.

I purchased this product to transfer Hi8 to DVD, and was completely disappointed.

Video quality is poor at best. Color is particularly bad - washed out, rainbows soaring thru the video, strange artifacts, and bursts of dropped frames (even though Pinnacle's software always reported zero dropped frames). I don't expect Hollywood DVD quality video, but I know what my source video looks like and this product didn't even look as good as streamed Internet video.

I might have tolerated the product with its video problems if it weren't for the audio. Others have reported 'no audio capture'. I didn't experience this but my captures consistently had 10 to 30 seconds of lag between the video and the audio. This made the product completely useless. I can believe that other reviewers didn't just have wiring problems.

The user interface is better than most other products, if not outright brilliant. The feature set looks great but I didn't waste the time to try most of it since the core functionality just isn't there.

I am running a 2.8GHz P4 with 512M RAM and 80G drive, so I was well above min specs. I used XP Pro w/SP2. In fairness, others have reported install problems on XP and I had no such problems. I did have multiple lockups while the software was running, and even Task Manager couldn't always kill it.

I tried to install on a Windows ME system with USB 2.0. Analog video worked but I could not get S-Video connection to work which was the main reason I bought it. Also, the software or its installation process did something to Windows that it started requiring a password on boot-up. I uninstalled the software and used System Restore to go back to the settings before trying to install this gadget.

If you buy it, make sure you set a restore point prior to starting installation.