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Have you got the right equipment to capture that excellent image of your favourite video? Graeme Sandiford has discovered the ProGrab 24RT Plus digitiser and we just can't tear him away from his collection of Star Trek videos.

After reading our round-up of flatbed scanners you'll be aware that, when it comes to capturing real-life images in high resolutions, they can't be touched in terms of quality. However, you'd have a hard job scanning video images from your TV screen with one and would meet even less success trying to capture a sequence of images by pointing a flatbed at your best mate. The right tools for these jobs are a digitiser, VCR and/or a camcorder.

A digitiser can capture images from a video signal, which can be received from most modern videos. Essentially they sit between the video source and your Amiga - almost exactly like sound samplers. For a long time, Rombo have dominated the digitiser scene, but at the end of last year a new product made its way over from Poland. The ProGrab24RT provided the same quality as Rombo's Vidi range, but at a fraction of the price. Not satisfied with this, Gordon Harwood Computers have just released version 2.52 of their ProGrab software and a new version of the hardware, the ProGrab24RT Plus.

One of the most important factors in how good an image can be captured is the quality of the video signal. With this in mind, the ProGrab24RT Plus has a SVHS (Super-VHS) Interface in addition to the composite one. SVHS signals are of higher quality than the standard VHS and the majority of the newer high-quality videos and camcorders are equipped with a SVHS output. This addition widens the ProGrab's market to include professional users, as well as home users and is certainly welcome.

Another new hardware-addition is a PCMCIA Interface. Before, the ProGrab, like most digitisers, used the Amiga's parallel port to pass data to the machine. Now, however, the ProGrab24RT Plus also comes with a PCMCIA Interface, present in all A600s and A1200s, as well as the parallel.

This has resulted in an increase in the grabbing speed, although this is also welcome it has greater ramifications than just a speed increase. As most digitisers and audio samplers use the parallel port it has, with the exception of integrated units, been impossible to capture both video and sound data simultaneously.

Sorry mate, that pound coin has fallen straight through the crack in the floor - you'll never find it again.

By using the PCMCIA Interface, the parallel port is freed up for a sampler which can be controlled by the ProGrab software to capture both sounds and images at the same time.

Talking about the software, it has changed quite dramatically and now looks more like an image processor rather than a digitiser. The main screen has been given a Workbench 2+ look with resizeable windows that can be moved around the screen. The main windows on this screen are for the filters and the modes.

The filters include traditional image processing tools such as Blur, Sharpen, Emboss and Wood-cut, plus a couple of new ones like Sobel and Laplacian. The available modes include Gamma correction, Balance, Shift RGB, Brightness and Negative.

Another welcome addition, as mentioned in last issue's review of Photogenics 1.2, is a ProGrab Photogenics module which enables you to grab straight from the hardware without using the supplied software.

What's more, this module is just as good, although it doesn't have the sound or animation functions it is great for capturing single images quickly and easily and even has its own preview window.

Right, back to ProGrab's own software, although the main menu has changed quite radically the grabbing screen has remained essentially the same. Except, that is, for one major enhancement - Amiga-owners with faster machines have the option of a double-sized preview window.

This means that rather than being limited to a poky little 160x64 pixel grey shifting smear you can actually see what's going on from 320x128 real-time display. The screen resolutions have not been changed and it is still possible to grab images in the standard Amiga screen sizes (from 320x256 to 1472x512). You are also given a choice of three video formats; PAL, Secam and NTSC.

Provisions also made for Amiga-owners with low-end machines such as the A500 which may be limited in terms of processing power and memory. The program now has a virtual memory facility that enables you to use hard disk space as if it were memory. What's more, you don't need an MMU, so any machine can use virtual memory although it will be substantially slower than using real memory.

These four frames have been taken from the enormous, but brilliant, Star Trek Voyager pilot episode. The frames were saved to hard disk almost instantly, decoded and then saved as an Anim5 file. Oh yes, do watch the video - it's great!

In another hard disk-related change, the animation tool can now dump images straight to hard disk. This means that you are not wholly dependent on your amount of free RAM when trying to capture several frames.

It's also possible to capture 5000 frames which can be separated by as little as 1/50 of a second, which means you can capture a large number of frames at least the quality as the original - trouble is finding an animation player fast enough to play it back!

With this latest hardware and software upgrade, ProGrab moves on from being equal with Rombo's range of digitisers to surpass them. If you are looking for a video digitiser, ProGrab's price, features and ease of use make it the budget digitiser to buy.