Margi

Display-To-Go CardBus PC card supports a wide variety of displays, analog and digital. For Mac and Windows. $299. (Available 21 August 2000.) [The Mac driver is based on a driver that Nano Urbina wrote for them. Nano has helped out the vision community several times before, making it possible to achieve high frame rates and enabling wait for blanking on certain popular Macs.]

Matrox

video capture

míro (formerly Radius)

Mac-compatible L-2F flat-panel due in September '99 at $2500-2900 with resolution of 1,280 by 1024 pixels. (Source: MacInTouch, 6/21/99).

miroVIDEO is now part of Pinnacle Systems.

Mirror Technologies (612)-832-5620, email

inexpensive two-page monochrome monitor & unique video card for older 68k Macs.

Mitsubishi

"Mitsubishi's new, $449 DiamondPro 710 monitor claims to be 'the flattest, sharpest, and brightest monitor available in the industry' and also features a contrast enhancement control, dubbed 'Fine Picture Mode.' Horizontal scan rates range from 30-86 kHz, and the 17-inch display has a 0.25 mm aperture grille. [Web site not yet updated.] " (Source: MacInTouch, 6/21/99)

Newer

RenderPix PCI/500

RenderPix PCI/502

Number Nine

Out of business as of September 2000. See their web site.

Pinnacle Systems

George Gordon writes (7/8/97), "It is my understanding that the MiroMotion 30 video card has been released. It is essentially a MiroMotion 20 card with the addition of sound and faster speed. I would be interested in hearing more."

 

Pete Kramer writes (9/30/96 in Macintosh PCI Discussion List), "I can report very acceptable results using the miroMotion DC20 on several PowerMac 7200/75 systems. While not broadcast quality by any means, the board produced good industrial/educational results just using the stock 500 meg quantum HD. You do need to be careful setting data rates. I used 2 - 2.5 kbps. With SCSI accelerator and AV HD, I think you will approach "broadcastable" video. Be sure to use Quicktime 2.5, as it corrects most of the audio sync drift problems that all the low cost video boards suffer from. Also, download the latest drivers from miro's web site and trash the ones that are packed with the board. When I got mine, it was bundled with Adobe Premier 4.0 LE, with a free upgrade to 4.2 LE, and full 4.2 for $150. Also, use the best quality video signal, Y/C (S-VHS) preferred, played in a VCR with timebase correction (Panasonic AG1980, AGDS850 or similar from Sony or JVC).

"A very interesting thing about the miro DC20 is that the same hardware board works in either Power Macintosh PCI or a Wintel PCI machine, just change the software and drivers! (Isn't that the theory behind PCI in the first place?) That's why I got 10 boards where I used to work, 5 for Mac, 5 for Win. The Wintel drivers are free at miro's web site, and the 4.2 LE CD has both Mac and Win software. What a deal for cross dressers!"

Precision Digital Images

video capture, PCI and NuBus

Promax

DH-MAX, a dual-monitor, accelerated AGP card for Power Mac G4 systems. (Introduced January 2001.) $299

Radius (now part of míro)

The Radius Thunder cards are no longer sold, but many people are still using them, so we retain the information below:

video cards for PCI and NuBus Macs.
Thunder, ThunderColor, and ThunderPower video cards for PCI bus have 10-bit DACs. The plain Thunder card is very slow (4 MB/s), but the newer (and more expensive) ThunderPower card may be ok. Radius says that only the ThunderPower card can keep up with processors running faster then 132 MHz. To keep up with fast processors, Radius's Q&A page recommends that you stick to their ThunderPower series. (Source: Macintosh Resource Page, 2/15/97.) Linda Glennie writes (2/97), "We are using the Radius Thunder 30 card, while not for movies, we do need to change the color LUT and the gamma table quickly (in some cases once per frame). This does not seem to present any problem. ... we are thinking of purchasing 2 more of these cards."

M. Mazurek writes (8/98), "I'm a student in Mike Shadlen's lab and I just ordered a Radius [ThunderPower?] 10-bit video card for $800 from a company called Radius Vintage at 800-375-9256. I had no trouble getting one, even though the Radius people themselves said they're hard to find."

David Alais reports (5/00), "4 months ago i made enquiries to Radius Vintage about the 10-bit ThunderPower 30/1920 graphics card. At that time they had them in stock at $799. When i finally got around to ordering one this week they told me the last one had been sold (to someone in the vision research community, i strongly suspect!). As they have been out of production for a long time now there are absolutely no more (new ones) available. I did check with many used Mac dealers (Shreve etc,) but none had any."

 

ScreenTest.m reports that the Radius ThunderPower card has a data rate of about 30 MB/s (faster for 32-bit pixels) and cscSetEntries does wait for blanking. [source: Steve Engel 8/4/98]

 

A confusing but innocuous "feature" of the Radius ThunderPower card is that the driver boots up claiming (in response to a cscGetGamma call) to have an 8-bit DAC even though the card in fact has a 10-bit DAC. However, it will accept 1024-entry 10-bit gamma table (cscSetGamma) if you ignore the misleading information provided by cscGetGamma.

 

How to load the CLUT on a video card with more-than-8-bit DACs.

RasterOps

video cards for PCI and NuBus Macs.
support@rasterops.com, (800)729-2656 option 2

RasterOps Horizon 24 (PCI) and PaintBoard Professional (NuBus) "Both boards have 9-bit DACs, supporting one display at 1152x870, 75 Hz." (Source: Bosco Tjan, 9/19/96)

How to load the CLUT on a video card with more-than-8-bit DACs.

James Sokoll Pty Ltd

PO Box 808
Kenmore 4069 AUSTRALIA
Tel: 617 878 3357
Fax: 617 378 9794

Psychophysics Display Interface, 12-bit DACs, NuBus. NOT RECOMMENDED!

Rhea Eskew, writes (5/27/99) "I purchased a Generation III version of this device (two boards), which never quite worked properly. After lots of back and forth with the manufacturer in Australia, over many months, I returned it to him for repair. Months later, no device in hand, I had to cancel the purchase. It's too bad, because the device has lots of potential advantages: high resolution videoDACs, customizeable driver (source code provided) capable of high refresh rates, etc. But having wasted a huge amount of time trying to get the thing working right, I would not recommend that anyone else try to buy one.

Symmetric

GLyder

3dfx

• Peter Bex reports (10/00) that the Voodoo5™ 5500 PCI for Macintosh supports 800*600 at 160Hz, among others. They provide a full list of resolutions.

Truevision (a subsidiary of RasterOps)

video capture. $1,995 and up.

TARGA 1000

TARGA 2000 DTX

TARGA 2000 RTX

DVCPRO TARGA 2000 RTX

Villagetronic is in Germany
orders@village.de 05066-7013-10, 95966-7013-49 fax
Software Hut is (was?) the U.S. distributor
softhut@erols.com 610-586-5701, 800-848-0079, 610-586-5706 fax

Villagetronic used to make several MacPicasso models, for both PCI and NuBus. All support 640x480 at 160 Hz. Their web site used to have a comparison page, listing all the MacPicasso models. Now they have newer products, and no longer mention the MacPicasso at all.

Ben Singer (bens@cvs.rochester.edu) says (9/11/98), "The MacPicasso 523 ($120) and MacPicasso 540 ($200) both have programmable timing. The dot clock goes up to 135 MHz on the 523, and 200 MHz on the 540. The 540 is their fanciest card. The timings section of the Monitors&Picasso control panel is where you can set several timing constants (descriptions from page 36 of the 523 manual).... the MacPicasso is doing fine with the latest version of PsychToolbox (2.33) and MATLAB 5.2.

Ben Singer (bens@cvs.rochester.edu) has a Mac Page-Flipping web page that provides MEX files for MATLAB. He says (9/10/98), "So far the only drivers I've come across that report multiple pages via cscGetPages are the ones with the MacPicasso cards. The 523 has 6 pages at 640x480x8 bits, and the 540 has 13 in that mode. So you could hold a 13-frame 640x480x8 movie in your MacPicasso 540."

Ben Singer says (9/10/98), "I've made a first pass at adding hardware double-buffering (page-flipping) capability through MATLAB calls. It seems to improve the MovieTearDemo on my MacPicasso 523. I'm attaching three commands via three small mex files and three descriptive M files. The mex files are basically just wrapped versions of functions from VideoToolbox GDVideo.c. The three commands are: PageCount, DrawToPage and ShowPage. Details are in the M files. I'm thinking about wrapping up some DrawSprocket calls into mex files as well, since it looks like DrawSprocket is the only way to get page-flipping on several of Apple's built-in video drivers (which report 1 page to cscGetPages, but more than 1 to the DS call DSpContext_GetAttributes on at least the 8100,7200 and 73/75/76/85/8600).

TidBITS says (12/97), "Many of us at TidBITS rely heavily on Macs with multiple monitors, so we were pleased when Kai Niggemann suggested the Villagetronic MacPicasso 516 as a cheap way to attach a second monitor to PCI-based Macs, 'This small, inexpensive PCI Video-card is not very fast, has no acceleration or anything, and only supports VGA so you need a multisync monitor for it. But it is probably the cheapest way to hook up that old monitor in the back of the closet. You can use the second monitor to store palettes from programs such as Photoshop and PageSpinner.'" The MacPicasso 516 has been discontinued in U.S., though it's still being advertised in Germany. In late December '97, Software Hut will introduce its successor, the MacPicasso 523, for $119.95 (not confirmed).