Rating: 
Summary: Product to Avoid
Review: The Dazzle Digital Video Creator could have been an excellent product. It is in a reasonable price range for those wishing to capture and edit their original productions or home movies. If you would like to put these back on tape so that everyone can watch them, as the box promises, than your out of luck.
The instructions included with the unit are vague and dont really touch on the topic of what to do once your done editing and want to record back to tape. Customer support is non-existent so dont bother calling or e-mailing. I have been struggling, with no luck, to put my edited videos back on tape for some time.
Given the readings I have done on various news groups and discussion rooms, I am not alone in this problem. The box, marketing, and all related advertising clearly promise that you can record back to tape, but you have to guess how, if at all, that is possible. The total lack of customer support, while annoying and inexcusable, is the icing on the cake for this great idea turned into a shoddy product.
A definite DONT BUY.
Rating: 
Summary: Know what you're getting before you buy this....
Review: The Dazzle is a great product for the digitization of VHS and other sources with an RCA output. However you should understand that it is not a exactly a full digital workshop. The included software is farely unintuitive and useful only for capturing the video in mpeg format. Altering and arranging the video proves difficult with the included software, and overall pointless. To work with the video, I recommend having a large amount of hard drive space available (I digitized a two hour vhs movie which took approximately 2gigs of hd space). On the plus side, this device was extremely easy to setup, and worked well on my PIII 900 laptop w/ 128 at any quality level. This device does capture the video extrememly well. I was able to capture video at well above vhs quality with little trouble (the only restriction to this is the aformentioned size requirements which can be taken care of with a little file conversion. I recommend DivX). To this end the device has been very useful, with variable quality selections depending on your source. One last note: Do not buy this device if your purpose is to watch tv. For some reason I have yet to find a piece of software that will allow me to watch the incoming video fullscreen at 30fps.
Rating: 
Summary: Very useful for some tasks
Review: The Dazzle Multimedia DM4100 Digital Video Creator is very useful to import video from your TV, VCR or DVD player into your PC for editing and then converting to PC video formats. The device is exceptionally good for making videos for use on the Web or as e-mail attachments. Thanks to its use of USB its very simple to install and can be "hot-swaped" with other USB device without rebooting your computer.I don't recommend using the device if you plan on editing videos on your computer and want to export it to video tape. If you will be using the device primarily for making videos for web broadcasting there is an Internet version available that is optimized for this task. The Internet version also includes a RealVideo converter and encoder. The included software package is very useful and stable. However, the included Ulead Video Studio and Ulead Photo Express are not the most current version.
Rating:
Summary: Crash-Crash-Crash
Review: The only product I've used that crashed Win2K with incredible frequency. 17 times in 5 hours, and I wasn't even capturing video. As for capturing video, prepare to be frustrated. Didn't matter how I set the program, it only saved to it's parent directory.
I should've been tipped off when the box stated that it worked with Win2K, but the software and drivers weren't in the box.
I ended up returning this for a refund/exchange.
Rating: 
Summary: Get ready to meet Dazzle tech support
Review: The USB version does not work with soundblaster live sound card.
It took me one month of writing e-mails to tech support. I finally broke down and called Dazzle support (no toll free number) and was told the problem was with the sound card and I should call their tech support. Like I said I have had this product for one month and still haven't been able to record a finished movie back to vhs tape.
Rating: 
Summary: Good tool for compressed video captrure
Review: The USB version of the Dazzle DM4100 video capture box is an excellent way to capture video into the MPEG1 format in real time. This format plays back well on modern PC and Mac computers but doesn't take up too much hard drive space. The quality isn't as good as a professional encoder but then it costs about a tenth of the price.
Rating:
Summary: Dazzle is the worst company
Review: This company is completely user hostile. If you complain about their very buggy software (I have tried three different units), they kick you off the message board. I finally got Dazzle 2 to work, but only after I figured out that the install routine under Windows 2000 was trying to install on the C drive (mine is on D)...with a nice script saying c:\ c:\windows...causing the driver to not install but data to be stored in the registry. They have far more engineers and marketing people than anyone that knows anything at all about software. Beware unless you know, already, everything about computer bandwidth, multitasking, how to overcome install bugs, and such...
Rating:
Summary: You'll be disappointed
Review: This product claims to have perfectly synchronized audio, which it does, but only when playing back a recorded clip on your computer. When viewing the input on your computer or outputting to a television, there is a delay of about one second from the time you hear something to the time you see it. This device does not function as a normal TV tuner or TV-out device, nor will it work for videoconferencing. You're probably better off buying an internal video capture device than going through USB.
Rating:
Summary: Not for Certain Computers and Difficult to Install
Review: This product is less-than-easy to install. Not only do you have to shuffle and manipulate heavy equipment, including your computer, television, vcr, dvd, and/or video camera, you have to deal with an extraordinary amount of wires and cables. In addition, once the setup was complete, I could not capture video. My system was within the system requirements on the box, but it dropped frames like crazy. I only captured about 1 frame for every 100! It was useless. Eventually, I ripped it out and traded it for an antiquated scanner.
| 
