Capture Card Recommendation

I have an Pentium III 877mhz XP machine with a SIIG 1394 3-port fireware card. It works fine with my Sony DCR-PC7 digital camcorder and MovieMaker, with one exception: The captured video is dark (much, much darker than it appears in the camcorder playback). I am able to brighten the video using video effects, but this also has the effect of making the resulting video far less sharp (i.e., clear).

Sooo...., it was recommended to me that I need a better capture card that would allow me to fiddle with the brightness on capture. Any recommendations? Thanks in advance.

-ron