I have a large collection of VHS tapes (commercial & home videos) dating back to 1982. Some are in good shape (and I am successfully converting these to DVD), some not so great and some are pretty bad. The worst suffer from complete loss of vertical sync, muddy colors, loss of detail, darks that are too dark and lights that are too bright that also smear. Restoring the bad ones is obviously beyond my current equipment. (JVC 9911 > AVT-8710 > JVC DR-M10). Even some of the not-so-great tapes are giving me a lot of trouble.

I have read Gshelley61’s most excellent sticky on hardware processing and am impressed by his results. Such equipment would clearly improve my videos. My questions are:

1) Vertical sync loss – There appears to be a variety of TBCs available. Which ones (if any) would be better at recovering vertical sync than my AVT-8710?
2) Which process amps (if any) could tackle the color problems that I am seeing?
3) How much improvement is possible? I don’t expect miracles but I would like to produce watchable video. (The really bad tapes look to be impossible!)

Thanks in advance. . . . .