The biggest problem I found with DV capture is that is uses 4:1:1 chroma subsampling which really reduces the picture quality.
In 4:1:1 chroma subsampling, the horizontal color resolution is quartered to reduce the bandwidth by half. In 4:2:2 chroma subsampling the two chroma components are sampled at half the sample rate of luma: the horizontal chroma resolution is halved. This reduces the bandwidth of an uncompressed video signal by one-third with little to no visual difference.
You are completely right about 4:1:1, but you might have missed one important detail. The ISD is PAL and I’m capturing in PAL and in PAL the chroma subsampling is 4:2:0, not 4:1:1, which looks light years better.