I am currently working on a project that will require an industrial video camera. The camera that fits my needs has a 'Y/C' output terminal. The frame grabber card I am looking at has 3 'composite' video inputs. Do these devices match? What is Y/C and composite?

Thanks for your help.

Bart Peintner Advanced Manufacturing Institude Manhattan, KS

-- Bart Peintner (bpeintne@amigo.ami.ksu.edu), March 04, 1999

Answers

Y/C is separate luminance/chrominance signals, whereas "composite" mixes everything together into one signal. Y/C will give you much sharper images, provided you have something that can grab it. I *think* Y/C may be related to S-Video, which also separates components, but I don't know if they're equivalent. The short answer is "no" they're not directly compatible. You can probably get a converter from a pro video place that will encode the Y/C into composite, but you'll take a quality hit in the process.

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), March 09, 1999.

Y/C output is common to S-video camera's since it eliminates the loss from subsequently encoding/decoding thereby preserving as much of the quality gain in S-VHS or HI-8 as possible. Most current grabbers offer S-Video inputs. Mine is a Matrox Rainbow Runner daughterboard on a Mystique 220; does a wonderful job. It's been superseeded by the so-called Marvel that has identical specs. Take a look a the matrox site. Without further details it's hard te bo more specific, though.

Good luck and let me know if I can be if further assistance.

Ton

-- Ton Lammers (ton.lammers@hta.nl), March 12, 1999.