Hello, my 1st post
I am buying a S-VHS for a while. Panasonic NV-FS200 was quite popular in my country, and there are sold from 150-250 EUR here and there. I'm affraid to buy a lemon, so I need some help, to spot obvious problematic deck. Recently I had seen one with odd behaviour:
- tape winding very quiet and I would say slow. My home VCR makes "tornado sound" when winding and it does fast(er). Also 25y+ ago I worked on JVC BR811 deck and was lound and fast. This sample of NV-FS200 might have problems with transport? What to look for? I tested unknown seller's VHS and mine JVC S-VHS tape, same on both.
- With TBC/off image was just shattered and I could not even say what is showing. With TBC/on image locked, but sometimes with split frame, with black horizontal line in the middle; again both tapes same behaviour.
- image weirdly dull (dark, muddy, low resolution) and finally with those horizontal bands over the freame, where dark feature in image than effects all further image to the right of frame. Just like a shadow casted through whole image horizontally, either bright or dark, depending on feature. Again, both tapes had exactly the same problem.
- image from S-VHS tape (that I remember it was good, since recorded on Panasonic AG455) resembles some 15th copy of rental tape and was exactly the same (bad) is owners tape, which was indeed replicated copy of his graduate party (aka "prom") and was expected to be bad. So my Original SVHS was not any better than his low grade VHS.
I skipped that deck, but would like to hear from experts if that deck just had "dirty heads" or "dead heads" or that might be typical problems, ... for future reference as next time problems might not be that obvious.
Many thanks.