Reading this site, I feel like I should hire someone to convert VHS

[sanlyn]

If you're playing tapes thru the Toshiba, its line-tbc is helping to clean up somewhat. Try playing one of those tapes thru someone's "plain old" VCR (not built into a DVD recorder with tbc), and you'll see a big difference.

A tape that's in excellent condition should transfer OK directly to DVD. I'm guessing the recorder has a few filters that could help somewhat. But you never know what's going to pop up with some tapes, even though they might "look" to be in good condition.

[robjv1]

There are many different ways to skin a cat, as they say.

As others have said -- buying the right VCR is paramount to getting the most out of your tapes. Of course one deck is not always well suited to play all types of tapes, so many of us have multiple VCRs. If you're trying to keep your expenses low, I'd find a VCR that can play your concert tapes well, because your commercial tapes will probably be a breeze in comparison and will look alright on most decks (as long as they aren't copy protected, you'll need something to deal with that).

A few notes -- I've found many consumer decks and combo units pump up the 'sharpness' effect to extremely artificial levels and that's going to create nothing but noise on a dark EP concert video. Many of them pump up the contrast much too high and wash out fine detail in near white areas. So I wouldn't discount the used JVC / Panasonic SVHS decks with line TBC and DNR filters in them -- especially if you're going to be watching this stuff on a big TV, you're going to want to get rid noise at the playback stage so you don't end up with additional artifacts. The JVC HR-7600U is a good deck (I had one myself) but in your situation I would take a look at the JVC SR-V101US, which is a much newer model based on the same basic functionality (although not as well built mechanically as the 7600u) that should hold up just fine for your small project. You can get them fairly cheap on eBay and every once in a while they pop up new in the box. The digital JVC HM-DH40000U and Mitsubishi HS-HD2000U might be a good choices too, as well as the Panasonic AG-1980, especially the latter if any of the tapes have tricky tracking issues. All of those decks should produce an image that looks more natural and without a lot of the typical consumer deck problems (wavy lines, grainy picture, too sharp, whites too hot).

Another thing to consider if your concert tapes are not hi-fi sound -- the quality of the mono/linear audio track varies from VCR to VCR. Some of it can be filtered on the computer side, but some decks (or not 100% working ones) will really muddy up the audio. I have a JVC SR-W5U deck which has better out of the box linear/mono audio than my JVC SR-7600U and JVC SR-V101US, but for mono tapes where I want the audio to sound the best, I have a regular old Panasonic deck under my desk. I'll record it in two passes and edit the video and audio together on the computer.