TBC-3000 generation, buying details?

[Gary34]

How do I know what gen a TBC 3000 is? What gen is this?

[lordsmurf]

It's not something you can see externally. All TBC-3000 units look the same on the outside, black boxes with buttons.

Seeing the actual boards gives a hint, narrows down possible generations. But actual performance verifies it.

As a comparison, right now, in the marketplace, I have certain Cypress units that are slightly worse quality than the best TBC-3000, but way better than the worst TBC-3000. Prices of those Cypress are about 10% less than the unknown TBC-3000s you see in the wild. At some point, gambling on perfection is worse than a quality sure thing. Sometimes my information is somewhat misused, in pursuit of unicorns. That doesn't mean accept and settle for junk, but it also doesn't mean to hold out for perfection that may never come (unless this is additional hardware, beyond a current workflow).

[Gary34]

Does this have hints on the circuit board?

[lordsmurf]

Whoa .... you may have stumbled onto a previously unknown EOL 5th gen. I had suspected it existed, but never could find one to confirm. I need high res images (put in a zip file, attach here).

The bad news is that the EOL is probably like the 1000 EOL -- not very good. But I'd have to test to confirm. Perhaps we'll meet up one day after all (though not soon). Odds are that it matches the 2nd/3rd performance, not the unicorn 4th.

How is the jailbarring? Noting that most people "can't see it", but "if it'd been a snake, it'd jumped up and bit you!" (aka, it was there, they just did not see it ... yet).

[Gary34]

Honestly I’m still a dullard trying not to bug you guys with too many questions lol. I appreciate you guys soo much though. I’m a novice with nice equipment.

EDIT:
Novice not dullard.
I don’t have any time experience and this all is going to be new to me.
Dullard is the wrong word.

-- merged --

Okay here it is.

-- merged --

What does the dip switch do?

-- merged --

Is it a switch for ntsc and pal then some of them have jumpers that go from ntsc to pal?

[lordsmurf]

Don't mess with the DIP, or you could screw up the TBC.

The DIP is undocumented, and for good reason. The 3000 DIP was never intended to be user selectable, due to factory tweaking.

PAL/NTSC selection is the first DIP. But it's not that easy. DataVideo are all "NTSC-first" or "PAL-first" in design. That means it is tweaked to work best in NTSC (or PAL), but it "also does" the other. The TBC-1000 is easy to see the tweaks, as it default searches for PAL (or NTSC), then looks for the other, being an auto-sensing TBC model. The 4th-gen 3000 tends to be fairly transparent between PAL and NTSC, but other gens can have overscan noise or image offset in the "wrong" format.

The 3000 board was used in other models, with DIP and hardware tweaks (including add/remove soldering). Those DIP were intended for other models. Using the wrong DIP setting in base 3000 unit could potentially harm something.

Again, don't mess with it.

[Gary34]

Im not but I saw some of them had jumpers and I didn’t see one in this. I’m not touching anything though and I’m gonna wait till my APG gets here to use it. It’s in such good shape now so I’m just gonna try and be as careful as possible.

[Gary34]

So I’m guessing the first dip is okay to change if I needed to change it to pal but maybe don’t mess with some of the other ones. Is that correct?