Image brightness balance issues when capturing 8mm film

I've got a rig set up to capture 8mm home movies to avi. I'm running
into an aggravating issue regarding balancing the brightness of the
image.

I find that if I set things so that the image is at a good viewing
brightness in darker/overcast scenes, it's overexposed on scenes with
brighter spots - bright daylight sky etc. bright sunlight areas are too
bright, loss of detail etc. If I turn down the exposure on the cam to
eliminate these overexposed spots, the darker scenes are too dark.

Using a Sony TRV-240 which has various auto exposure settings as well
as a manual exposure adjustment, going into a Pinnacle DC-10 capture
card and Pinnacle Studio 9 as my capture software. Though this cam does
have firewire pass-through for DV, I prefer doing it mjpeg to take
advantage of PS's adjustments for input
brightness/contrast/hue/saturation when capturing in mjpeg mode. For
monitoring, in addition to the monitor window within Pinnacle, I'm
using an outboard tv monitor fed by the composite out on the capture
card.

Other than this issue, the overall image is good - I'm able to get
pretty close on color matching from the projected image to the avi
file, image is pretty sharp, the projection surface I'm using is a
translucent plastic that pretty basically eliminates the hotspot where
you don't see an obviously brighter spot in the middle or slightly
off-center as is common, but I'm still having this
overexposed/underexposed issue. I've tried fooling around with the avi
file in Virtualdub after the fact to bring up the darker scenes, but
anything I've tried doesn't yield as good results as getting the
exposure at a good level on the initial capture.

Do you think I need a different camera or is there another solution
other than readjusting every time there's a change in the scene
brightness? (not really practical) And other than "send it off to have
it captured", I'm definitely in DIY mode.

Thanks for all input

brassplyer wrote ...
........
> Do you think I need a different camera or is there another solution
> other than readjusting every time there's a change in the scene
> brightness? (not really practical) And other than "send it off to have
> it captured", I'm definitely in DIY mode.

Alas, the quality you get with most professional telecine
transfers comes from just the kind of hand-tuned, personal
attention that you seem to want to avoid. In these days of
automated everything, there are still things that are better
the old-fashioned way.