Matrox Rainbow Runner G Series Review(Page 4/4)

Posted: August 31, 2000
Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen

Visuals

Now that we’ve covered all driver issues, lets take a look at how well the Rainbow Runner displays images on your monitor.

Below we have a screen shot of an image taken straight from CATV.

We see here that the video on this card has some aliasing on edges. If you take a look at the top of the bus, you’ll see that the edges are made up of a series of staircase like formations. This is called aliasing. What you want is a card that can do anti-aliasing. Yes, much like in your 3D games from cards like the Voodoo5 and GeForce2. How would a card go about doing this?

On a TV, all your images interlaced, that means they have a pattern of alternating image and non-image lines. These are commonly called TV lines for the obvious reason. Sometimes having an interlaced image can produce better-looking visuals and cover up some of the flaws in the image. Unfortunately the Rainbow Runner does not have this feature available. Nevertheless, its images are quite good and much better than MPEG1 videos.

Uses

The Rainbow Runner G is a great add-on for users that already have Matrox video cards. For users who don’t have Matrox cards but would like to have the functionality of a TV tuner and be able to record directly into high quality MJPEG format, you can also look for Matrox’s G400 Marvel, which has the features of a standard G400 card, and the Rainbow Runner G. You can make really decent videos using these great cards and record them on to CD.

Conclusion

Matrox has made a great upgrade for its users that really extends the life of its excellent product. The Rainbow Runner G brings everything that you can want from a TV tuner card with the functionality of a professional capture card swiftly into one easy to install product

Overall Rating: [ 8.8 / 10.0 ]

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