This specific model was sold around 1998. I probably still have my receipt. It was an excellent VHS VCR, good tracking range, decent recording and playback both. Not soft, no chroma offset/bleeding. It had a "detail" mode than sometimes actually helped, though sometimes just made grain worse.
It does have SQPB, but SQPB was craptastic. It usually made S-VHS tapes look worse than VHS tapes. It simply made the S-VHS tapes viewable, but not with any degree of quality.
SQPB is from early/mid 90s that I can remember, maybe 1994.
I still have one of these. All of the others got zapped over the years, even ones on UPS.
Lovely VCR, worth keeping, just not for S-VHS. Go ahead and try, but odds are you're going to see black streaks in the image. That's not normal. Such issues are not present in good S-VHS decks.
If you only have a few tapes, consider outsourcing the conversion work to somebody reliable (like us,
Contact Us). Sometimes DIY isn't the ideal way to go.