I have a 1/3" CCD camera on my Zeiss microscope which has a BNC video output and a Y/C output. The Y/C output is routed to a computer via a video capture device which outputs USB for the computer.
The BNC is routed to a high quality video monitor.
This rig lets me capture images on the computer while also viewing a larger image on the video monitor for demonstrations and such.
Unfortunately, the resolution of the images on both the video monitor and the computer is somewhat low, and I need to upgrade to a better camera.
The camera that I am interested in is a 6.6 megapixel CMOS camera that outputs USB 2.0 only.
My question is how can I output a video signal to my external monitor so that I can continue to use my video monitor? Do I need a video capture card on the computer?
I think you’ll just need a graphics card with TV-out on it (most of them have this nowadays, AFAIK. This enables you to put your computer display (including the USB-captured microscope images) on the TV.
A lot of video cards have the TV-out device as a second output device, so you can do a dual-head type setup with the TV. Then you just have to maximize the output of the camera on the second screen and voila, just what you want!
I guess I was hoping for some device that would pass the USB to the computer, but split it off and convert to analog to send to the monitor.
The dual-head card would work though.
Well, the USB data coming from the camera is very high level. A device that decoded the USB and whatever higher level protocols (DPS/PTP, or something) were on top of that, extracted image data (and 6.1 MP is a lot of data) and then converted to an analog signal at probably vastly different refresh rate would be a very very specialized piece of hardware. Built out of commodity components this would pretty much turn out to be a computer with a capture card and a TV out card. Built out of specialized hardware it would cater to a very small niche market and supporting every camera would be a nightmare. I will be surprised if such a product exists.
Oh, and you said microscope, and they said insulin.
Ah. It did occur to me that perhaps that’s what you wanted. I’m not sure that you’ll even get to do this particularly easily with twinhead graphics cards; in my experience, it’s quite hard to get something to maximize and stay on the second desktop space.
One solution that might be worth exploring would be to attach the camera to a second PC, dedicated to the task of capturing the camera output and displaying it full-screen; this one could have the TV-out card feeding the TV and networking the two computers together, I’m pretty sure it should be possible to serve up the images to your main PC so that you can take snapshots etc.
