It looks like VMagic capture cards are higly rated on videohelp.com. Although they do not have an NTSC tuner (being a German product) you can apparently attach an NTSC source to them and it will capture MPEG-2 at any bit rate and resolution you want, and can even convert AVI to MPEG-2 files on your hard drive. Do you have an opinion on the VMagic cards? Based on the reviews I'm tempted to see if they produce better quality compared to my Hauppauge WinTV PVR 350.

The tuner is the only thing PAL. If you feed it source from a VCR, using composite or s-video, it will probably still be able to capture NTSC. It all depends on the software and the capture chips, which brings me to the next thought... What capture chipset? There are not many out there, so I really would bet it's the same as a Hauppauge one.

Those reviews on videohelp also look 3 years old.

Most people I know deal only with ATI, Hauppauge, Canopus and Matrox products. It's honestly going to be difficult to beat the Hauppage PVR 350 in terms of quality. The next step up, in my opinion, would be the $1000 Matrox RT.X100 cards.