Thought I might share my experience with trying to capture old family Video8 tapes, which could apply to those with Hi8 too. The original Sony camcorder used to record the tapes I have is currently lost and don't know the model #, but it was probably a late 80s (Video8 only, no Hi8) consumer grade Sony camcorder. As the original camcorder tape deck stopped working, and ended up losing it somewhere in the house.

So a few years back I got a 1992 portable "Video Walkman" GV-S50 for $80, with a heavily cracked LCD screen. Which is fine by me as I just need it for outputting the signal. It has RCA Composite output and also what I assume to be a higher quality 12-pin A/V output connector which Sony apparently dropped and never really supported the connector. Looks like this. In the manual, this A/V terminal is only mentioned once with brackets saying "for future use". So this is a RCA Composite only unit, with stereo Hi-Fi support, no TBC, and according to the manual supports both Video8 and Hi8 playback. However on page 6 of the manual it says Hi8 playback is possible but it can't record in Hi8 nor will it play back in as high of quality as a real Hi8 player.

So I was happy with the GV-S50 thinking it was making the most of my Video8 tapes, apart from not having a TBC. But weeks ago came across a 2004 DCR-TRV460 Digital8 camcorder. I bought it at a local charity shop as is for $20, without even knowing if it turned on because the battery was dead and did not come with anything else, not even a charger. Payed $10 on the charger online, which showed me the unit does turn on. There seems to be something wrong with the video sensor as it only outputs black to the LCD screen and to the Digital8 recordings I try to make. But I can record from my VCR to Digital8 with the camcorder, which is cool but of no use to me. So this camcorder is dead as a camcorder but that's ok, cause it makes a great Video8/Hi8/Digital8 player.

This DCR-TRV460 supports RCA Composite A/V out/in via a 3.5mm jack along with a S-Video out/in. It has a TBC and a DNR, which are not bound together like my SVHS JVC player. And apparently fully supports both Video8 and Hi8 playback, but I don't have any Hi8 recordings.

So naturally once I got things working, I wanted to do some comparisons between the two devices using the same Video8 tape. So I used the Video8 tape of my old neighbor going to prom 20 years ago, for comparison. Both were captured by my Hauppauge 1250 card using the same proamp settings. It has a S-Video port and used a simple S-Video to Composite connector for the GV-S50 transfer. Used Virtualdub to capture it with Lagarith YUY2, same color space as the card. The original capture is interlaced 720x480 but used Avisynth/SeparateRows(2) to show the individual fields. No other avisynth filters were used.


GV-S50 left - DCR-TRV460 right
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The GV-S50 has no TBC or DNR, and is Composite only. The DCR-TRV460 had the TBC turned on and the DNR turned off, and was captured over S-Video. I did not try the DCR-TRV460 without the TBC, as it was usually volatile without it.

I don't know how much of the quality difference is because of the difference between composite and s-video. Anyway I'm pretty happy with this DCR-TRV460.