campbellb@viking.UUCP (Brian Campbell) (03/29/90)
I received my AST Vision-plus upgrade last week, and I am posting my observations about it. Virtual Realities is apparently a new company that currently has rights to the AST digitizing technology. Their enhanced version of the Vision-plus system is called Visionary GS and they offered an upgrade option to existing Vision-plus owners. First, their advertised turnaround time is said to average one week. In my case it was about three weeks. Maybe they had a larger than expected demand? Anyway I was some what skeptical of just one week, and had anticipated a longer turnaround time anyway. They returned my digitizing board with a new replacement ROM Chip. I'm not certain whether other components were replaced or not. I also received new disk software that is similar to AST's software. It has a few enhancements, but a much better software package is under development and was promised to be delivered when available. Regarding B&W imaging: Past problems I have had are gone. With AST's product, I was able to capture some video images cleanly, but capture other images with varying amounts of static. In several cases, the results were completely unsatisfactory. With the upgrade, I tried may kinds of images, and all were imaged cleanly. During the realtime display of the video image on the GS screen, there is still a small but noticable amount of static on all images, but when you freeze and capture an image, the static is virtually gone. In other words, with the upgrade, B&W imaging always works now in what used be just best case situations. In addition, I used to frequently get a black "fuzzy" band along the left margin of the image, and that is now almost entirely gone in my new images. Regarding color imaging: A vast improvement was noticed. With AST's product, I always got a lot of snow when capturing individual R,G,B images, and this was also apparent when these were combined into color images. (Color images are captured by imaging Red, Green, and Blue filtered images in rapid succession, and combining them via software. The software also allows you to capture individual R, G, or B images). Now the R, G, and B images appear as clean as the B&W images, and it shows in the combined color images as well. Regarding the supplied software: First, the software is said to be compatible with system 5.0.2. Since the needed system software is on the disk, you can boot straight from the disk. The biggest change is the software that takes the R,G,B images, and attempts to find the 16 "best" colors that can best represent the image on the GS screen. Instead of one algorithm, the new software offers five! I tried each of these algorithms on different images, and found that I got interesting variations on the same image. As the documentation suggests, different algorithms work best for different images. Other comments: The old software (due to the rom or disk?) seemed to crash at the drop of a hat. That is, slight variations in the video source, such as fast forwarding, no video source, etc. would cause the software to crash. The new software appears more resistant, although not completely immune to crashing. One complaint about the product (old and upgraded): The video images are captured with the assumption that the pixels images are square. But on the GS screen, the pixels are not square: they have a 5:6 ratio. Thus, captured images appear slightly elongated in the vertical direction. It would be nice to offer a capture option that shows images on the GS screen in their true aspect ratio. I have written software for myself to take a captured image and stretch it so that it creates an alternate image in the true aspect ratio of the GS screen. I have found that the results are always satisfactory (with B&W images anyway). With the supplied software, it is possible to rubberband a portion of the image and stretch it one way or another, but it is difficult to get consistently accurate results via a mouse. Usual product disclaimer: no associations with the manufacturer; just a customer.