This picture was captured by the Snappy device. It was connected directly to my Samsung camcorder and all the pics were captured "live" or "straight thru the camcorder lens. This picture here is rendered with jpg compression to reduce the file size so the page loads faster. The picture was captured at 1280 by 960 and 75% of the picture was cropped out. But notice the excellent focus and lack of jpeg effects. Without the limitation of video tape, the Snappy produces very impressive results using a cheap camcorder and your pc. Although my Snappy cost me $199, that was in 1996. Today I see them all the time for less than 20 bucks. Sure now there are bigger and better things out, but in 1996 you couldn't beat the results without putting out a bundle for video editing equipment! And the best thing about it is, you need no special equipment to capture video from any NTSC device like TV's, VCRs, etc. The Snappy connects to the pc through the parallel(printer) port and connects to the rendering device's RCA jack. Because of the huge bandwidth requirements necessary to capture streaming video, a dedicated port is highly recomended. In other words, sharing the port with a printer or scanner is not a good idea. An add in port costs $10-15.