These devices are just garbage.
PAL/NTSC Conversion
The quality of PAL/NTSC conversion is hideous. Your image will have not only drop-frame deinterlacing artifacts, but I've seen this genre of devices cause the image to vibrate vertically and/or horizontally. Excluding hardware that costs more than a car or house, there is no way to motion compensate between formats in real-time, aside from a sloppy method involving drop-frame deinterlacing and frame doubling/reduction. You'll end up with supremely crappy video this way. Ghosting is very typical.
Even some of the better VCRs (Panasonic AG-W1/2/3 and Samsung clones) have a number of artifacts that make for a lousy overall image. Those VCRs are best used as-is, to play PAL, NTSC, SECAM, etc, into a computer. These VCRs were great to have in the mid 1990s, but worthless (in terms of conversion) by the mid 2000s. Still decent VHS-only VCRs for playing tapes, due to the Panasonic transport in use.
Let's dissect this review, for example:
Quote:
International Standards Conversion. It converts in and out of NTSC and PAL and, unusually especially considering the low price, inputs and outputs SECAM. It also handles pseudo PAL and every other permutation you can think of, including South American PAL. I was greatly impressed with the conversion quality and did a side-by-side comparison with our own broadcast Prime Image Penta II – which cost around £5000. It comes a surprisingly close second. The only quality differences are quite subtle, mainly noticeable in pans when converting PAL to NTSC. There was noticeable judder and horizontal shimmering but no converter is totally transparent, regardless of cost. For the vast majority of footage, especially if it does not contain an enormous amount of movement or detailed graphics, you would barely notice the conversion. One thing I did observe was that NTSC to PAL was subjectively better than the reverse. The SECAM conversion in all directions is also excellent. This unit blows converter-type VCRs such as the W1 right out of the water.
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So, let's break down the two bolded items:
1. Comparing one low-end inferior device to another is rather silly. Even if one is better than the other, they're both still lousy.
2. Then basically state it's only good for video with no motion or detail. So .... it converts slideshows nicely? Really!?
Color Correction
The color correction abilities are a joke. To make an analogy, the color correction abilities of these devices are to a proc amp, as a family sedan is to a sports car (for the purpose of street racing). Yeah, it can correct color, as much as the family sedan can go fast when you push on the accelerator -- but it's far cry from a tool built for those specific purposes. It's not a proc amp replacement.
Timebase Correction
As has been pointed out on this site multiple times, there is no universally accepted definition of
what a timebase corrector does in the video hardware manufacturing sector. Given the price point, there is a chance this was a basic TBC with a few added chips to tend to the color correction (similar to an AVT-8710/CTB-100) and format conversion (similar to the consumer-grade VHS converting VCRs). In fact, it may have been a modified CTB-100, given how Cypress outsourced to several private labels.
At the same time, however, I've often found that companies with most flowery marketing --
i.e., the ones who tried the most to blow smoke up your butt with their marketing -- had products that were very marginal in abilities. When it comes to TBCs, that often means it's not what most of us end users would consider to be a TBC. Specifically that it does not fully replace and re-sync the timing of the signal. The video still have jitter or signal noise, meaning there is no observable benefit to the so-called "TBC".
You really have to watch for this. Don't believe everything is a TBC just because it's been written on the box.
Conclusion
It may sound harsh, but the only people who would recommend this device would have to be amateurs with no idea of what quality looks like. This appears to be yet another device that's all marketing and limp on quality. I'd compare it to the also-discontinued Sima products.
I would not pay more than $50 for one of these.