Zoomed Video is a connection between PC Cards and host system allowing cards to write video data to the VGA controller directly. Since the data is transferred over the Zoomed Video bus instead of the system bus it requires no buffering or interrupts. This is beneficial to both legacy (16 bit) and CardBus (32 bit) equipped systems in terms of performance. Many 1996 and newer notebook units feature Zoomed Video, but there is no easy way to determine whether a machine has ZV besides contacting the manufacturer and asking.
Most notebooks with two PC Card slots only feature ZV in one of those slots, usually the lower slot of the two. Typically, CardBus equipped machines will also have a Zoomed Video slot since most CardBus bridge chips feature ZV support. For example Apple's PowerBook G3 systems with ZV support only support Zoomed Video in the lower slot. This is sometimes the cause of problems experienced by users trying to install a ZV card, since they are essentially accessing a slot without Zoomed Video.
Synchrotech offers several products that take advantage of this PCMCIA standard. For detailed information please see The Zoomed Video Port for PC Cards white paper.
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