Re: Wondering About Apple II video digitizing

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

In article cv985@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Michael Elliott) writes...

>Just curious-
>I haven't been able to find much in the FAQ about video digitizing on an
>Apple II- is there a source of info somewhere (WWW etc) on the various
>cards, software, what the Apple II is capable of in this manner, etc?

As far as capabilities...

    Well on an 8-bit Apple II, video digitizing is obviously going to
be extremely limited. Since you have only a fixed color selection with
low resolutions, most any video you capture will have to be done by
using patterns of dots (as done in newsprint, where you can give the
illusion of shading and depth by the size of dots and how far apart
they're spaced). Color is basically out of the question, so you capture
in B&W (1-bit, pixels on or off) using either mono 240x192 or 560x192.

    The Apple IIgs is much better suited for video digitizing, having
more color and resolution (and none of the limitations working with
color 8-bit Apple II's have). It works great for B&W images, since
you can use greyscales (16 levels of descending grey) and can get
near-photographic quality images in 320x200 resolution. Video captures
using color is possible, but the results aren't generally going to be
as good as B&W since you can only display 16 colors out of the 4096
available (you can use multiple palettes, but it gets messy. Works
for GIFs okay, but not so well on raw-video ;)

As for digitizers available...

    Off the top of my head, there's ComputerEyes for the 8-bit Apple II,
which as far as I know, works using 1-bit B&W. I can't give opinions on
it since I've never used or seen one before. There's also an Apple IIgs
version called ComputerEyes GS (originally called Color ComputerEyes?)
that lets you capture in 320x200x16 in greyscales or color. I own one
of these actually, although haven't used it for quite sometime now.
It does decent greyscale captures (especially with a camcorder) and
pretty mediocre color captures. It's not a real-time capture board,
so you need to have your image perfectly still for 6-12 seconds (on
a VCR that means a still-pause without bar-noise). My two favorite
uses for it were: capturing images through a camcorder using the video
camera's zoom-macro close-up feature, or capturing Japanese anime's in
color (it seemed to do color captures okay with animated stuff :).

    The other product for the GS is the Vision Plus Enhanced (originally
the AST Vision Plus and Visionary GS). It was better than ComputerEyes
in that it was a real-time capture board, there was no wait time to make
a video capture (in fact, if you hooked it up to a TV, you could watch
it on your GS RGB screen, even if slightly choppy :). It did both color
and greyscale, and with special software, I believe you could covert a
raw-data image into 256 or 3200 colors (someone else will have to give
their opinion on that, I've not seen the card before). Oh both cards
could use 640x200 as well, but with only 4 colors/greyscales of course.

    The final capture board worked on any Apple II model, it was called
the ImageWorks II. Unlike the above though, it used its own video chip
to capture and thus exceeded the capabilities of even the GS. With the
card you could do real-time video captures in 256 levels of greyscales
(the GS only did 16 levels) in a resolution of 256x256. The catch was
you couldn't use the images in Apple II programs, even though they could
be saved to disk (nor could you share them on other Apple II's unless
they had this board). It was a professional capture board though.

..that is basically it, unless you want to talk about image scanners
which scan papers, books and anything else you roll under them (i.e.
Thunderscan, Lightning Scan, Quickie, Apple's flatbed scanner).

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca