I have one of those. And yes, it is junk. The device simply behaves badly.
With only 30 tapes, have you consider sending it out to a service? I ask because I'm the one here that mostly deal with Hi8, and enjoy working with the format. All you need is the right equipment, but given the cost of "the right equipment", paying others to do it can be the same or even cheaper. With Hi8, you need an external TBC to not have issues. Even the with-TBC cameras will drop frames.
The Dazzle is awful in the dropped frames department, and even worse with DV/MPEG compression via the included software. It's usually Pinnacle Studio, but sometimes worse junk is included.
So that's where you are with this.