Video-Cable Reviews

I'm returning mine in the morning. Image quality is terrible in normal indoor light. In low light it's useless. Even the slightest movement is a blur on the screen. It looks cool and has a nice travel case, but if you want a functional camera, this isn't it. I'll stick with Intel.

Its been two days I've had this web-cam. Very dissapointing... I literally need to sit under a table lamp to to be able to see any pictures clearly. Under normal light, the recording is too dark -- to be visible.

I'm dumping this and buying a logitech tomorrow... Its not even worth 10 bucks.

I've owned this cam for some months, and its perfect for me because I travel constantly. Yes, it struggles in low light (interior light, which is where one ususally is) like a digital camera, but if one turns on an additional lamp, the image is acceptable. It has a great, rugged little carrying case, and the whole cam is tiny; perfect for mobility. And, it's best characteristic...it is easy to use and very reliable. For lest than $50, I have not been tempted to return it.

Monster Cable makes a lot of great cables. I think they are most known for their stereo cabling which is of much higher gauge than generic speaker cables, and they have great cables for the RCA in and out jacks as well. These are all ANALOG signals, and the extra quality can (and does) make a huge difference.

On a digital connection, ambient interference is automatically filtered out. I don't own this item, but had to say I did in order to write a review. Cheap IEEE1394 cables are just as good. If you want to line the pockets of Monster Cable, replace that junky speaker cable you bought at Radio Shack!

I have just returned the Monster IEEE cable [...] after comparing it side by side with an inexpensive [...] cable. It is all marketing hype as far as IEEE link is concerned. {The less expensive} cable worked as good as the Monster Low Noise, Gas injected etc. cable. So do yourself a favor save some money.

Do not be fool by marketing and pay 4x more for the same result. Monster Cables are great for all ANALOG signals. You do not need gold connectors for DIGITAL data. A $10 cable will do exactly the same. Do not worry about noise on a 6-foot wire unless you are planning to loop this on a high voltage power wire. Technology is moving away from Monster Cable.

I bought this cable to connect my laptop's s-video port to my TV. I was a bit confused about the whole "two coaxials" thing (my TV only has one RCA video port), but I figured they were just redundant. When I got the cable, I tried each RCA connector with my TV. One gave a black and white rendition of my computer screen, and the other gave me junk.

As it turns out, this cable does not do any signal conversion, per se. All it does is take the two signals on the S-video cable (luminance (Y) and chrominance (C)) and puts these two signals onto 2 separate cables with RCA connectors. It DOES NOT convert the s-video signal to a composite signal, i.e., what you need to plug into the "video" port on your TV. This makes the cable WORTHLESS- no TV (at least to my knowledge) accepts the separate Y and C signals alone with RCA connectors. ...

To make a long story short- this cable will not work to connect your laptop or other s-video out device to most TVs. Don't make the same mistake I did.

This cable has a male s-video connector on one end and TWO (count em, 2!) RCA connectors on the other. This cable is not sufficient to convert an S-video signal into composite. So if you are looking for a way to plug your S-video only DVD player into your TV that lacks an svideo port but has a set of free RCA's, this WONT do the trick. The 2 rca's seperate the video signal into black and white and one that is blank. Im guessing it splits the signal's chromanance and luminance between the two rca's... but whatever - it's not gonna do the job I wanted it to do so if you're looking for an s-video to rca adapter look elswhere.

I cannot speak for PC users, but this product was absolutely worthless on my Mac. Although my computer met all system requirements and I followed the directions, the adapter simply did not work at all. The software included is amateurish and buggy, no user manual was included (despite advertisements to the contrary), and the read-me files contained on the CD were unhelpful and written in broken English. I contacted QVS tech support for assistance, and they attempted to solve my Mac problem based on their (limited) knowledge of the Windows version, because they didn't have access to a Mac. It seemed that anyone with a basic working knowledge of computers would have been better suited to provide tech support. In short, stay far, far away!

Works fine with Win 2000, video capture quality satisfactory, but captured audio doen't have low frequencies.

Avoid this ADS Instant DVD (?) at all cost. Have tried on two computers, and the USB2 cannot be detected on either. Sorry I bought it.

I can't really add too much to what's already been said. The product doesn't work, tech support is non-existent. I bought it online, received it on a Friday, returned it the following Tuesday after reading about the tech support problems everyone else has been having. When I was installing it, as I plugged in the USB connection, I got the Blue Screen of Death and my computer crashed. When it rebooted, Windows told me the hardware was not designed for XP and that I should not install it. Hmmm, why then does the box for Instant DVD have the "Designed for Windows XP" logo on it? I went ahead with installing the updated software and drivers anyways. When I tried to preview captured video, I got nothing. A black screen. Could not get it to work or do anything. Tried capturing even without seeing anything in the preview in 2 different programs. After 20 seconds it stopped and told me the file was corrupted. And despite the fact that the unit was doing nothing, every time I had the device plugged in, my computer slowed down, my mouse wouldn't respond, and the programs would crash. So I had even less success with this product than the other reviewers here. I have a month-old computer with all the latest gadgets and gizmos. If this doesn't work with my computer, whose computer does it work with?

Having read the positive review here and hundreds others on another website, I will be trying out the Canopus ADVC-100 (do a search for "Canopus" only if looking on Amazon). If after reading this, you are still considering buying this product, do yourself a favor and shoot yourself in the foot instead. It will more fun and less painful.

I bought the ADS Tech Instant DVD +DV after reading some great professional reviews in some of the online magazines. I was really excited to get this product. I now wish I'd paid more attention to the actual user reviews, as near as I can tell the people writing the magazine reviews must have never actually tried to use this product. Put simply... it doesn't work. Believe the user reviews, this is a bad product.

I wanted to transfer some old VHS videotapes to DVD, and I also got the +DV option thinking that it would be a nice way to add Firewire capabilities to my USB 2.0 based system for use with my new Digital camcorder. The Instant DVD box failed miserably to deliver on either of these goals.

Using the DV input with my digital camera I had strange artifacts start to appear on the screen. There were weird blotchy sections that started out small, but then grew as the capture progressed until half the screen was covered. While transferring my old analog VHS tapes, certain sections of the tapes would cause the box to completely lock up. When I could get a capture that didn't freeze, I couldn't get a capture where the audio and video would stay in sync. I tried multiple tapes, multiple DVD mastering programs, even multiple computer systems, nothing worked. This was simply making DVD's straight from the captured footage, I wasn't transcoding anything. The only thing that worked for me was taking a nice clean analog signal from my digital camera (since the digital DV capture didn't work.) That was the only thing that stayed in sync, any input that was less than perfect, like 10 or 15 year old VHS tapes, forget about it.

I sent several email queries to the ADS Tech support, after giving up on their telephone support after waiting forever on hold. Other than the automated "Well get right back to you as soon as possible" responses, I've heard nothing else from them. That was six weeks ago... and I'm not holding my breath. If you buy this product, you're definitely on your own.

I've long since returned my box, and chalked it up to a learning experience. Here are a few things to think about, first of all, do you really want a box that converts straight to MPEG2 format? If you want to change *anything*... clip out a few scenes, add a title screen, join several clips together... you have to reencode the file anyway. By uncompressing then recompressing you're sacrificing quality, and not gaining anything from the built in compression. Also, I didn't realize at the time, but you can get a Firewire card with a cable for almost the same price as just a cable... it's cheap, and much better than spending all the extra money for the +DV option.

I now own a Canopus ADVC-100, it's more expensive but worth every penny. More importantly... it actually works! That's much more than I can say about the ADS Tech Instant DVD.

This is the worst gamepad I've ever seen in Logitech's line up. There are few very buttons, making it useless for almost any game. There is no start button which many have gotten accustomed to nowadays. The buttons on the right are so tiny! They feel odd and qwerky when pressed. Logitech has been known for making some of best game controllers out there, and I don't see why they went to make this so poorly. I'm very dissapointed in this product, thus do not recommend to anyone.

Brand new, won't even calibrate properly. Save your money. Logitech should be ashamed for putting out such a piece of [junk].

I bought this to play Nascar 2002 mainly so I thought this would maybe be O.K. Not so...Action is terrible...worse than a 20 year old Atari controller.So unless you like to crash or get your...whipped in fighting games ...spend a few more bucks.

This adaptor, if it is the one I think it is, is supposed to work for several systems, including XBox, Gamecube, N64 and others (where is the Dreamcast inclusion)? I don't know why but the last reviewer was 100% right on the money (Jose).

Hooking this up to either a N64 or Playstation (original) makes it sound horrible. It sounds like static while the game is running. It is so bad that you can not coherently hear voices or music, it all sounds very very scratchy. Without the clean sound, obviously, some games are completely unplayable. I am sure it likely works that way with other systems, too. Do not be fooled by the price, please please, just buy a first party rf cord for each console of your choice.

Ok i got this item but when you put an n64 system on the adapter and you turn the system on, it takes like 5 seconds for the screen to come up. After that the sound quality is very poor. I dont know about other systems but on n64 it dosent seem to work very good.

I would rate this product ZERO stars, but this format does give me the choice. I purchased this product for the purpose of capturing analog video on my PC - primarily to freeze frames into "stills." The clerk at CompUSA said it should be capable of producing 800x... resolution. Not true! The tech guy at Belkin support said it should produce at least 640x... resolution. Also not true. Recent info from Belkin's web site finally declares "up to 388x... resolution." It also claims the ability to make "stunning videos on your PC." They're STUNNING all right ... appalling would be a more appropriate description. The images are VERY POOR quality. Don't buy this product if you want anything more than very grainy, choppy, pixelated images.

I purchased this item to extend the reach of my webcam. I plugged the active usb extension cable into my computer and rebooted and now the computer doesn't recognize the webcam. I then plugged my keyboard into the active usb extension cable and the computer doesn't recognize the keyboard either. I came back to the website to see if anybody else wrote a review which reported a similar problem. Either this cable is defective or there is some special procedure that must be employed to have the computer recognize a device plugged into it. At the moment, this item is totally useless.