Playing VHS on a SVHS Player....The Truth.

[foveauxkid]

HI..Please What is the Truth..Years ago I read an article on Capturing that stated the importance of using a good quality SVHS VCR to play ones tapes (prior to capture) even if the tapes were normal VHS...
So I have been looking for a good SVHS machine..... Now I have been informed I will not get better quality by using a SVHS VCR as against a normal VCR.

So I would be extremely grateful for some expert advice on this ..Many Thanks F.K.

[zoobie]

I'm not an expert because I'm spread too thin but, yes, the better machines will have better playback...and possibly a TBC in there somewhere...
Whether or not it's feasible to you to purchase a better machine to run off a few tapes is another question.
Labs can run them off too...

[aedipuss]

i think the truth is somewhere in the middle. you can't get better quality than what was recorded with vhs but you are less likely to get poorer quality off the tape with an svhs deck. they had better, thinner heads and are less likely to "lose" data off the tape and so may provide a better source.

[thecoalman]

EdDV went into one of his extensive comments that will make your head spin on this subject once, wish I had bookmarked it. Anyhow from my experience there is little/no difference between using the s-video cable and RCA cables on my tapes on the same svhs machine. However the svhs machine is a much better machine overall, your generic VHS decks are simply not built as well as a svhs deck and won't provide the same capture quality.

[JohnnyBob]

I have a Mitsubishi HS-U778 which was a good machine in its day. If using S-VHS tapes the quality was excellent, but those tapes were too expensive so I mostly used VHS tapes in S-ET mode. I recently used it to transfer some tapes to DVD using a Magnavox MWR-10D6. The tapes were partly ordinary VHS and partly S-ET mode tapes. I saw no reason to transfer tapes to DVD if they were available somewhere on DVD because the quality is a lot less. I did about 25 tapes and the quality was fair to poor, nothing that I would call good. I suppose they're watchable, and better than nothing. The point is, don't get your hopes up. The DVD quality wasn't quite as good as the tapes themselves maybe because optimization wasn't possible with that DVD recorder. For example to record a 65 minute tape, I had to set it for 2 hours, so the bitrate wasn't nearly as good as should be possible.

I think you might get best results if you can use the VCR the tapes were recorded on originally. I used a variety of VCRs over the years and most of them went to the boneyard a long time ago, so I didn't get a chance to test that theory very much. My HS-U778 had problems tracking some of them, and couldn't play a lot of them very well -- occasional fade-in/out, etc. I was also surprised to discover that occasionally there was a copyright protection notice from the DVD recorder saying the tapes couldn't be copied, but things continued nevertheless, just introducing a minor glitch at that point. Some of the tapes were 10-15 years old.

P.S. Naturally I used S-video connectors and cables, which is a lot better than RCA or rf.