Which VCR should I buy?

[rudolf016]

Hi,

I tried to capture some 7-14 year old svhs-c tapes. I have a svhs-c to s-vhs adapter.
First I tried to capture the video with our high quality svhs-c camera but the camera had some defect so it had very little noise at about 1 fifth from the bottom. So I tried to capture it with our cheap (200 CHF) VCR from 2002 it had so much noise, that you could barely see any thing.

So now I would like to buy a s-vhs player, recorder, or camera so I can Capture it with.
I already found some I think would be good:

Panasonic NV-HS100, Panasonic NV-HS900, Panasonic NV-MS-1 (camera), JVC 3-CCD GY X1 TC SVHS C625PAL (camera)

this is where I'm looking at:http://www.ricardo.ch
Which one would be most suitable for capturing home videos without any noise? Or would you suggest any of these?

p.s. I'm sure that the noise at the bottom fifth is because of a defect of the Panasonic camera and is not stored on the tape it self.

thx for any reasponse

[Ace Adey]

I've bought a Panasonic NV HS-830 'Buy it Now' auction on ebay from a seller into editing. It's to play around with some very dated VHS tapes and I want to feel re-assured that this VCR is the right one. There are a lot of 'tecchies,' preaching TBC and all that. I don't believe this one has a TBC circuit, does that make it bad?! Probably, but I will use it anyway and see if the results are better than a very old Nicam Digital Stereo VCR that they we played on back in the day! It was a Mitsubishi VCR. Very much the toy of the moment when we bought the thing. If it still worked today I doubt it could compare with a model built in the 21st century, such as the NV HS-830. My research was not full and I don't want to sit around waiting for a 1980 or some other Panasonic NV HS-930 with a TBC for months! Soz gurus. Anyway that's me so we shall see when it comes. I'm already excited. It should be early December.

[sanlyn]

There are many good non-TBC VCR's on the planet. Many highly touted TBC-equipped machines didn't fare so well with damaged or very old VHS, so their TBC's were useless with those tapes anyway. You can use a Panasonic or Toshiba DVD recorder as a line-level TBC pass-thru device between your VCR and your capture setup (Don't record onto the DVD machine -- that's a no-no with noisy or aged VHS -- just "play thru" the recorder to make use of their built-in TBC's). Even with an excellent and stable VCR, capturing old VHS without a line-level TBC of some kind (builtin or pass-thru) will imbed many problems into your capture that you won't be able to eliminate.