Attempt 2

[Andrew J Sempere <asempere@world.std.com>]

Apologies for the spam... the text of my message got lost, I see.  

Here it is again:



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Greetings all... I have been lurking around this list for a while now and

finally (finally) managed to find a pxl in my price range.  So now I own

one, but I have a few questions.  It's possible that the answers to these

are simply "because it's really a toy camera from 10 years ago" but if

they are actual problems with solutions, I'd appreciate the help.



-The first thing I did when I got the camera was to modify it, which went

well, except that the picture doesn't look so great.  With the monitor on

normal brightness, all I get are extreme contrast images and a very dark

picture.  This is with a whole lot of different lighting, including

sunlight.  The picture is so dark that you just kind of make out lines and

areas of white on black.  If I turn the brightness up all the way on the

monitor I get a fairly normal pxl image, except that the brightness is up

all the way - the monitor distorts slightly and the border is gray-ish...

the picture is there but looks rather washed out.  I tried this on an old

Apple monitor I use for video (It accepts standard RCA) also on a

television with similar results.



-At one point I had the URL for the manual which someone had scanned... I

lost it and I cannot find any reference to this anywhere - I've searched

with Alta and also looked at every pxl page I know of (all four of them)

Could someone remind me? 



-The pxl I have will record on tapes, but the playback is filled with so

many artifacts as to make the footage unusable.  I'm guessing that this is

because I tried it using a non-metal tape, but without experience I'm not

sure what happens with non-metal tapes.



-If I have the camera hooked up to a monitor and I move it around

everything's fine, but it if I aim it up or down at roughly a 45 degree

angle the picture rolls (vertical hold goes all screwy).  It also gets

distorted.  is this because the signal is unstabalized (I'm going straight

from the camera to a monitor)?  Why only at an angle?  (I'm certain it's

the angle.)



Allright, that's it for now.  Thanks...



--

Andrew Sempere

andrew@nish.mit.edu

http://nish.mit.edu/Andrew