S-VHS vs Vidcraft detailers

[freebird1963]

I have a Mitsubishi HS-U748 S-VHS vcr.
I also have Vidicraft Detailer II and a Detailer III but they only have composite plugs.
What would give me the best pic for capturing overall. ?
The S-vhs directly to my capture device.
or the S-vhs using the rca plugs thru one of the detailers ?

Thanks
mark

[harley2ride]

Are you talking about RCA Component cables, or Composit cables. Component cables attain excellent capture quality direct from vhs or s-vhs, as long as you use a lossless or near lossless capture software like Huffyuv.

[lordsmurf]

Vidicraft is composite, not component.

[gshelley61]

For VHS sources, composite is probably going to have very little difference from using s-video because of it's relatively low bandwidth. Try it both ways to see if you can spot any difference.

[Marvingj]

There is a device that have S-Video on one end and Composite on the other it would help you profoundly. Also you would the advantage of S-Video al the way to the Capture Card or VCR. I believe Radio Shack has them for about $3.00 a piece. Hope that helps......

[lordsmurf]

Those composite to s-video adapters are generally very cheap and introduce noise. Any gains that would have been made getting to s-video are lost.

[gshelley61]

Don't use an s-video adapter.. you will probably wind up with nasty separation artifacts like dot crawl by doing that. Your capture card or DVD recorder will digitally split the Y and C for encoding anyway.

[ozymango]

I have a Mitsubishi HS-U748 S-VHS vcr.
I also have Vidicraft Detailer II and a Detailer III but they only have composite plugs.
What would give me the best pic for capturing overall. ?

Depends on your source tape, I'll bet -- you might find that a clean SP tape looks fine when captured direct from the VCR using an SVHS cable, and then you find an older SLP or EP tape from 1992 that could stand a run through the Vidicraft.

Being you're only out the cost of a couple of cables either way, I'd say this could be useful experiment -- try both ways, with a couple of different tapes, and see if you notice any difference. If both look the same (and look pretty good), then I'd probably lean towards the most "simple" route and just go straight SVHS between devices. But again it may depend a lot on your tape, another tape may look iffy when run straight but put it through the detailer and you go, "Wow, that really helps!"

Good luck and have fun!

[TBoneit]

Some tapes need the help of the Detailer, a Detailer II in my case, to spiff up the picture. Not all or maybe not many but some.

OTOH Since I upgraded my DVD Recorder to a Pioneer 531h and my VCR to a JVC 9911 and added a full TBC, they all improve the picture in different ways so I rarely use the Detailer II.

YMMV

The JVC VCR has noise reduction and a line TBC, The Pioneer DVD Recorder allows me to sharpen, reduce noise, adjust black levels and white levels and amount of color and the sahed of color. I used it recently where the people on the tape looked more like martians to return them to normal fleshtones.

In your case given your equipment as posted I'd keep the detailer handy to sharpen detail or reduce noise.

Good Luck