New JVC HRS9800 for $1000?
 

https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?m...2F283372504746

Only $1000 currently! :D

A fool and his money are soon parted. That deck for $1k+ is stupid. When the aged dynamic drum gear goes, somebody is in for a rude lesson in JVC S-VHS VCRs.

I suspect some shill bidding there, The same bidder kept raising the bidding from $350 all the way to $1000 and he didn't win the auction? That's some weird $hit right there.

$1000 for a VCR that sold for $400 when new in 2002?

That beats the inflation rate, which would correspond to around $580 in 2019. The $1000 represents a compounded rate of return of about +5.5% not bad.

Condition said to be new in an unopened box (if you can consider an ~18 year old VCR new).

There were three bidders, one dropped out quickly at around $350.
Two (one on automatic bids) fought it out to $1000.

Interesting that the second place bidder withdrew his last bid of $1125 ~20 min before the auction closed resulting in it defaulting to the $1000 bidder.

What are you saying, the fix was in? ;)

Who knows. This was the only recent action by the winning bidder. The other two bidders have bid on other items in the recent past. So maybe it was just a case of some bidders having more dollars than cents.

Based on the final sales price, that seems like a very fair assumption. :)

I also suspect shill bidding.

At this late date, there's really no such thing as "new old stock", because the equipment will age regardless of use. The grease, capacitors, etc. Even worse if it was stored in attics, garages, or storage units.

Quality video hardware is a lot like quality cameras lenses. They hold value, and are never really obsolete.

The way pricing works is this:

Take the TBC-1000 as an example...

- In the late 90s, it was about $350 new.

- Varying factors caused it to increase to about $500 new ($480 + shipping at B&H, the best price at the time) when it hit end of life in the mid 2000s, used prices in $350 range (+/-75 depending on supply&demand).

- Used prices in the early 2010s were still in the $350 range, with many longtime owners simply wanting their money back for their purchase ($350). They finished their projects, no longer needed it, whatever. And I was one of those several years ago, sold a few of my oldest TBCs for about $400 shipped.

- Go forward in time several more years, mid 2010s, and now you had people wanting to sell off their TBCs for the $500 they had invested. Understand that $500 new 10+ years ago, and $500 now, is not the same amount of money. When considering inflation, $500 then is less than $500 now. So used price did decrease some. I also sold some in that $550 range, recouping my initial costs for those units.

- Understand that used camera gear (f/2.8 glass, pro bodies, etc) generally fetches anywhere from 50% to 125% of original price, ignoring inflation. What happened now on the TBC aftermarket is that scarcity has driven those up to the 125% range, which gives you the $750 range (+/-100 depending on supply&demand) now commanded for the units. Taking inflation into account, it's really not that much above the $500 new from 15 years ago ($650 in 2019 dollars).

- Now you have both buyers that got in at $350, some at $500, and some from the new-normal $750 range. So you get resale asking prices all over that range, but most are in the $500-750 range. Even those that got in at $350 see the value is $500+, and so ask for that as well.

But unlike the TBC-1000, which has no moving parts, and can be just as perfect now as when it was new (based on storage, care, and usage patterns), that specific JVC has known wear issues with dynamic drum gears. $1000 is outlandish, not at all reasonable. A minty cherry 9800 may be worth $500, but no more.

But the inverse is also an issue:

I recently had a person tell me he's waiting to find a TBC-1000 for under $300. Well, good luck with that. Yes, you sometimes see strange things like this, those "too good to be true deals". At least some tiny % of those deals really was true, but the rest are not. I should know: I hear about them in emails, PMs, or shared here in forum posts.

Another person recently told me about snagging the FA-125 for $150, but it needs calibration. We're still messaging to determine if it has other noise issues, and it probably needs a quick mod to work better. It's not going to be a simple process of buy it, plug it in, and go. People must come to terms with the facts that cheap video gear needs repair and service, more often than not. At a low price point, you're gambling, not buying.

The 3 bears: too high, too low, just right.
- JVC 9800 for $1k = too high
- TBC-1000 for under $300 = too low

Sometimes you get lucky with an estate sale, a divorce disposal, or going-out-of-business sale where in the liquidator does not know what they have.

While looking for 35mm slide projector a number of years ago I bought a box a box at a yard sale that, for $5 netted not only a Kodak Carousel projector that only needed a bit of cleaning (what I was looking for) but also a lap-dissolve controller, cables, beer tap handles, and unlabeled Video 8 tapes that upon later examination was found to hold home-made adult video :devil:. (Almost as funny as picking up used answering machines and then listening to the tapes people left in them.)

This is a carry-over of a private message thread between LS and me - he's very graciously offered his assistance in locating quality hardware from trusted sources so I can digitize family VHS tapes (home movies and assorted OTA broadcasts with commercials).

Admittedly, I'm super late to the VHS transfer game, but I do find joy in the digitizing and archival process, otherwise I would just send my tapes out to a vendor to do the transfers and be done with it. I'm a pro photog by trade, and enjoy learning best practices when digitizing for archival projects. My current core competencies outside of the day job are centered on film negative scanning for grant-funded projects involving media from state archives.

I told LS my budget for external s-vid TBC is around $300, which he said is likely not reasonable based on the current market. He's completely right. But I'm playing the long game and don't need to do the transfers in the near-term - I have nothing but time to find the right external TBC in my budget.

My tape media are stored in a climate controlled environment, and the quality of the transfer will only increase as I gain experience in transfer and capture techniques with my specific decks and capture hardware. Consistency, predictably and quality over expedience.

Looking at some of my now legacy redundant dSLR hardware (lenses in particular), recouping 50% of my initial purchase investment is not a bad idea at all... and could help cashflow my analog tape digitization projects (additional funds for a quality $300 TBC-1000) if a sub $300 TBV doesn't find its way to my studio in the next 3-6 months. :)

I have a lot of nostalgia for my old camera bodies, so I have a hard time parting with those. But the same isn't true of lenses. I sold some lenses several years back, then used those funds for a pair of different lenses (Nikon factory refurbs), plus a new D810 (haggled on greentoe.com). Those camera bags are also sacks of money, never forget it.

For most people, video hardware isn't a forever purchase. Buy it, use it, resell it. :wink2:

Just a thought or two.

If this is a project of fixed and finite duration you could bite the bullet and pay the price knowing that you can recoup most of it when you sell the TBC at the end of the project. If a long term paying project there is time to amortize/recover the cost, and the cost of the gear is likely much less than the value of the time spent using it.