I've owned a late 2001-built AG-1980 for a few years at this point-- in excellent shape with all its' innards in good standing- but there's an issue that I have never noticed until several weeks ago came up as I was reviewing footage frame-by-frame while running the QTGMC deinterlacer.
When a drastic color change occurs between frames or scenes, the last frame of the old scene's colors tend to "bleed" into the next few- it almost looks like a bad telecine or the smearing on a CRT/tube camera, but this problem is prevalent in every tape I test with it, filmed, videotaped 60i footage or otherwise- this is not an issue with the de-interlacer as running footage from other VCRs turns out fine, and these other VCRs I have tested (e.g. a HM-DH30000U, HR,6700U, PV-1530 and an HR-S5902U) all do not present this quirk.
Here are some comparisons- the first frame of a new "scene" vs. a few frames after.
( There were some images embedded here, but that wasn't good enough and the server whined about it, so here's a link.
https://imgur.com/a/6wr8iTf )
I know they aren't the best examples but it's from the files I had on hand at the time. You can make out details from the scene that came prior in the first example (the entrance to a building) and in the second, the black frames prior to the iris effect bleed into the color image that comes after causing the first few frames to look quite de-saturated.
I have replaced all of the SMD capacitors with new ones on the Y/C board, and while it made some "rainbow" noise issues with badly duplicated or poor SLP tapes go away, this did not fix the "burn-in" effect present on all tapes in all modes. I'm curious if the tantalum/ceramic capacitors could be the source or if it might be the power board itself- but regardless most importantly I want to know if this is a common AG-1980 issue as I see it in videos on Youtube often but nobody really speaks of this problem.