VHS Decks - Recommend me a good make/model...

HotConductor

HotConductor

Well-known member
This is an odd request for me... I haven't touched a VHS tape in AGES, and our local Chamber of Commerce handed me a big project involving restoration and... I need to buy a VHS deck.

I already have a Blackmagic Intensity Pro card that takes most any format I throw at it, so I'm not looking for an 'all-in-one' solution, or anything like that. I just need a rock solid deck for playback. Any recommendations?
 
it has to be a deck? or can you just use a vhs player, or one of those dvd/vhs combo players that have up-conversion through hdmi.
 
SONY made a great line of broadcast S-VHS decks that you can find used for a song on ebay. Look for the SVO-5800 or SVO-9600.

Panasonic's similar models are the AG-7350 and AG-7750. Their line of mid-grade editing decks for S-VHS were also pretty solid: AG-1970 and AG-1980.

You're definitely going to want something with an internal TBC if at all possible. Aging VHS/S-VHS can have some pretty jagged control track, and with out a TBC you'll have a hard time getting a stable picture.
 
I'm with you on TBC. I was eyeing this model... http://www.ebay.com/itm/Panasonic-A...ltDomain_0&hash=item2c64c34bb8#ht_3356wt_1194 Definitely what I want, but not the price. I will look at those other units you mentioned. All of them look pretty solid and after a while they all start to look the same.

@Amr - It could be a conversion unit that outputs HDMI but HDCP can be an issue in those situations.

Its funny to look at these decks and realize that I truly only care about the picture quality and output, and absolutely NOTHING having to do with the recording features.
 
HotConductor said:
Its funny to look at these decks and realize that I truly only care about the picture quality and output, and absolutely NOTHING having to do with the recording features.
Click to expand...

Some of those have player-only models. Search around... they're out there.
 
even if the intensity pro did not like the hdmi input(did not know it checks for that, some if not all converters works on ps3 which has HDCP), you would still get s-video. but i guess there won't be much price difference between a deck used and a vhs player. it might take too much space, weight too much thou.
 
Kind of a "6 of one" call there. One is going to cost more to ship just because it's large and somewhat heavy... but it's a player and that's what you need, and it has an internal TBC.

The other (MD830) was designed for use in medical installations. I'm not certain that it has a TBC built-in, and the manual on it is pretty ambiguous.

Of course, if it comes down to it and you need an external TBC, shoot me a PM. I have one here that isn't seeing much use these days, and you're not far from me. You'd be welcome to borrow it for the project.
 
I appreciate your offer on the external TBC. Honestly after this initial project I will probably move on to digitizing all the family VHS tapes that my folks and my wife's folks have... Fun project... Getting a VHS deck that has TBC built is what I want to do at this point. I'm thinking this Panny DS540 is going to do the trick.

Whether any of these drives lives through 100 tapes is just an educated gamble these days. A deck can work great for 2 days, then crap out. Other times we could buy one used, clean it up and have it work for years. That was my experience when I got started on Trinity editing systems back in the late 90s.
 
Yeah, I have an old AG-1960 that I bought used about 15 years ago. It worked fine for a couple of weeks, then went all wonky. Can't even sell it for parts. They were great decks in their day, and I did a bit of A-B roll editing on a system with them in high school. Nothing fancy, mind you, but for cuts-only editing on S-VHS, they were solid.
 
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