Camera comrade
6 min read
JCL DIGIPIC AMIGA Capture
Simon Rockman looks at the Digipic while the Digipic looks at Simon Rockman
DIGIPIC is from JCL, a British peripheral from a company which has been producing add-ons for Commodore computers since the Pet days. The author of the software, Harry Broomhall has been something of a Commodore celebrity since the days when 8k was a lot of ram and a disc drive an exciting luxury. It’s great to see a local company taking on the US competition, but how does it shape up?
Digipic is a video digitising peripheral. It will take a frame from a video source like a camera or video recorder and turn it into a bundle of binary digits with which to illuminate your Amiga screen. Frames can he stored in HAM, IFF and Digipic’s special extended grey scale format.
You don’t get a camera with the Digipic. What you do get is the digitiser a dull grey box with a lone LED to indicate when it is on. a 3.5 inch disc with the Digipic software, a neat but simply printed manual and a filter for taking colour pictures.
Because of the way the Digipic works you need to use a black and white camera, even for colour pictures.
You probably know that your computer sends signals to the monitor as red, green and blue signals. The filter allows the computer to “see” red, green and blue elements of whatever the camera is pointed at so that the software can handle them individually.
Special filtering circuitry allows a colour camera to be used. This also means that you can squirt pictures into Digipic from a video recorder and infringe loads of copyrights.
The Digipic plugs into the parallel port which means that you will have to unplug anything else connected to the port, usually a printer. When Commodore designed the A2000 and 500 it changed the connectors to bring things like the serial and parallel ports in line with world standards. Why it didn’t extend this to the monitor plug is a mystery.
The practical upshot of this is that JCL has had t put two connectors on the lead, one of which looks temptingly like a through bus for the printer. It isn’t, and trying to connect the two will cause major problems.
HAVING set up a camera and tripod, a few lights, an optional monitor which will allow you to focus a camera, the Amiga and the Digipic with all the associated leads, you are bound to have tripped over a few wires. This is the point at which you appreciate that the software at least is easy to operate.
You may not have à monitor with which to check the signal, so the software does its best to help you out. A loop mode digitises the picture as often as possible. The hardware captures a frame in 1/50th of a second, so you don’t need to worry about things moving and blurring the image. But it takes a little while for the picture to get from the RAM in the Digipic to your screen, which means that you can miss pictures. Digipic isn’t really meant for action stuff.
Pictures are stored in what the Digipic calls slots. Getting the three pictures needed for a colour frame and the Digipic software into a 512k machine is tight, and future software revisions may well require a full megabyte. Anyone who is serious enough about graphics to have bought a digitiser will probably need the extra ram for other things anyway.
The picture starts life in the 64k ram inside the Digipic. Digipic II will have at least 96k, so that it can offer a screen resolution of 640 by 400, but it will be a long time before it becomes available. Also it is supposed to be secret.
When the whole picture has been stored in the Digipic it is sent to the Amiga, which takes about 0.6 seconds. The data is sent to the slot you have chosen and stored in two forms, bit plane (as used in Deluxe Paint), or a more efficient compacted form. You’ll get about 20 standard pictures on a blank disc, the number of compressed frames depending entirely on how efficiently they compress.
You can squirt shots into the slots one after another by using the Multi feature, or you can select the slots individually. Because a copy of the last frame is held in the Digipic you can mess with the contents of the current slot safe in the knowledge that there is a copy of the original at the other end of a parallel lead should you need it.
The thing which impressed me about the Save feature was that it used the correct Amiga calls, which means that it can access devices developed after the software was finished. In my case this meant a hard disc with strange partitions. It means that Digipic can save to the IBM bridgecard (the Janus device), a network or even an optical disc. Wonderful things standards.
Harry Broomhall did admit the Save Window ignored some conventions, blitting the requestor straight on to the screen and not using a proper window, but when it comes to talking to the outside world the software keeps kosher.
Most TV cameras handle contrast, brightness and sharpness automatically, but this will not necessarily produce the best results, so there are tools to alter the display under software, be used without it. To my mind this made it of extremely limited use.
Like its author, hardware designer Richard Leman, the manual is friendly and chatty. It is proof that what a manual says is far more important than the quality of the typesetting. It covers the Digipic comprehensively, updates being provided in a readme file on the disc. A more comprehensive index would have been useful, but with only 54 pages which are laid out in a logical sequence its omission is not the crime you might suppose. A better manual would have allowed for some example pictures.
This is a scientific instrument, most of its applications will be found in laboratories and for this reason its price is not that important. If it is being used in conjunction with thousands of pounds worth of test machinery the fact that it costs £100 more than NewTek’s Digiview is not important.
Digipic offers the same facilities as the NewTek product but has a faster grab rate and feels, subjectively, better made. It is a fun product to use but it seems a bit of a luxury unless you are either using your Amiga professionally or as a dedicated artist.
Report Card
Digipic
JCL. Business Systems Precision
Software 01-330 7166
£299
USEFULNESS
Scientific and art applications will appeal to a lot of users. Video recorder compatibility makes it a techie toy.
EASE OF USE
Marred only by the lack of simple things like a power switch and printer through port. A doddle to set up.
SOFTWARE
Excellent, with a wide choice of functions. particularly the ones Friendly and well written.
SPEED
High capture rate but some of the functions, particulary the ones involving colour take a while.
VALUE
A top quality product is never going to offer stunning value. You pay a lot more for slight improvements.
OVERALL 61%
Solid and reliable. Built with the specialist user in mind but tremendous fun for the wealthy gadget freak.
Source of information – AMIGA Computing of June 1988 – Download of the magazine below:
