CompUSA was selling this for $69 minus a $20 instant rebate bringing this product to $49. However they were out of stock and got it at Circuit City. And they price matched it too.

I have some old video tapes that I've figure will wear out one day and the quality will be pretty bad. So I was looking for a product that I can capture from an analog digital camera to my PC and then burn it to a CD.

Dazzle looked like it would do the job. Advertised that you can hook up your analog camcorder, VCR or even TV and capture your recording.

Installation was a snap except I goofed on installing the drivers. There was an addendum. However it said to use my original W98 CD, but it never asked for it.

The tutorial was sort of helpful but not really great. Had to fool around a bit to get it to finally work.

Note 1: Movie captures are created as an AVI format. You can have up to 4GB (using W98) clips which translates into 15 - 18 minutes of video at a time. Then you can string it together in your storyboard for a longer capture. Assuming our hard drive is large enough. Had to find this out from Dazzle website.

Note 2: You can download the manual from www.dazzle.com. It's in PDF format so make sure you have Adobe Acrobat installed.

Note 3: After capturing, you can produce your "movie" and convert it to MPEG format. So your 15 minute clip of the AVI 4 GB format becomes about 15 minute clip 250 MB MPEG. Good compression.

Once you figured out how the software works, it's pretty simple. When capturing, it shows how many frames were dropped. Using a 600 Mhz laptop with 128 MB RAM, it was surprising that there wasn't that many frames dropped. Usually it was in the beginning.

The quality of the video and audio is pretty decent for the price of this product. Admittedly the size is small, about 320 by 252. However there is an option when producing to create the CD as a VCD. So if you have a DVD player that can play VCD, you can watch it in your TV.

Just make sure you have USB support, an extra RCA plugs since they were not provided or SVHS plugs and you are ready to go.

My friend bought one too but he is using XP whereas I am using W98 SE. Heard there might be compatibility problems, but he got it to work after talking with me.

Last thing, the software provided is not the full software. So some features are not working. But it will do everything you need to create a movie with special effects, added text or transition between screen.

Recommended: Yes