Dazzle DVD Recorder Review

It seems that today’s market is all about data transfer or data conversion. Portable storage and the ability to free yourself of those old bulky analog contraptions that are still sitting in your closet behind all the cobwebs… right next to that old skull you found in the ground when they were digging the foundation of your house. Face it. Analog video cameras deserve to die. And today we have a host of different tools to make that passing easier and faster.

Well… maybe not faster.

Ladies and gents, I give you the Pinnacle Dazzle DVD Recorder. Now you can take all those old crappy movies of you making a mess with your birthday cake as a kid and put them on a DVD for no one but you to enjoy. You could probably even include special features, like your Dad finishing off a bottle of whiskey before beating you that night to congratulate you on “becoming a man”. Okay, maybe that was a little over the top. But really, I didn’t grow up with you and I have to assume that you had your values beaten into you.

Here are some specs on the Dazzle:

• Video inputs: Composite video (RCA), S-Video (Mini-DIN)
• Audio inputs: Stereo Audio (RCA x2)
• PC connection: Hi-speed USB 2.0
• Capture from any video source with composite or S-Video output
• Output Formate: DVD or DVD-image

 

System Requirements:

• Windows XP (SP2 or higher) or Windows Vista (32 bit only)
• Intel Pentium or AMD Athlon 1.4Ghz or higher (2.4 Ghz recommended)
• 512MB of system RAM
• DirectX 9 or higher compatible graphics card with 64MB (128MB recommended)
• DirectX 9 or higher compatible sound card
• 1GB of disk space to install software
• 1 USB 2.0 (High-Speed) port
• DVD burner for creating DVDs

Okay. I’m going to cut to the chase right now. I don’t have high hopes for this particular product. Something in my gut just tells me that the video quality and the time it takes to capture it is going to be absolute crap. So I’m just going to get right down to it. I don’t feel like screwing around with this one. Yes, the gloves are coming off.

What’s in the box? In mine there was a white and chrome Dazzle DVC-101 USB capture device, Pinnacle Instant DVD recorder software, and a Quick Start Poster. Okay, really? A poster? We’re geeks here. We don’t want posters unless its of Middle-Earth or of Arwen posing nude. Give me a book, or give me death. Of course, once I looked inside I saw that the “poster” is actually a 4”x4” piece of paper. Amazing. That said.. that concludes the contents of the box.

Hooking everything up is fairly straight forward enough. One end is a USB plug, so just plug the damned thing in and install the software. After that it’s a simple matter of connecting your analog output on your old camcorder to the input on the Dazzle. Then you set the software to capture and your camcorder to play. It’s really that simple.

I decided to fish out that crappy old VHS-C camcorder out of my closet (God knows why I haven’t thrown it away yet) and record a minute or two of home video I shot of my kids playing in an apartment I had just moved into. This is just to show the quality of video that the Dazzle captures. I threw away every other tape I had after converting them with my VHS to DVD standalone.

After a couple of minutes I stopped the tape and played the video back to see what it looked like. The video was foggy, and extremely low quality. This is partly because old consumer cameras sucked, but it’s also because in the process of converting analog to digital in real time, the quality drops significantly. Colors blend, motions blurs, and edges become smudges rather than the crisp lines they should be, but this is to be expected for any MPEG conversion.

My conclusion is that for a consumer who wishes nothing more than to convert their analog tapes to DVD and can’t afford a stand alone burner, then this is probably a good purchase for you. Considering that some websites will charge you nothing less than your soul to convert your video and burn it. But for anything other than your lackluster home videos I would recommend getting better equipment. The Dazzle is a good. But in a technical world where we demand greatness, it has to be something at least better than Good.

	REPORT CARD : Dazzle DVD Recorder category rating comments Quality 4 Pretty good video considering MPEG conversion Innovation 3 Not the most elegant solution, but works. Installation 3 Just hook up, load software, and go Performance 2 Included software crashes often Value 3 Cheaper than standalone dvd recorder, but at the cost of much more work FINAL VERDICT: 3 out of 5 stars