I'm getting ready to capture a collection of family videos and am testing out my equipment with a commercial tape to establish my workflow. I've noticed some chroma bleeding / smearing and am wondering if there's something wrong with my VCR. My setup is a JVC HR-S7900U with a VC500, using
VirtualDub to capture to UTVideo.
The first thing I noticed are dark horizontal bands coming off the yellow bars in the logo. It's a bit hard to see in the capture, but on a monitor (directly from VCR) they are much more noticeable. I tested this with another VCR, a generic composite only Toshiba (W-614R), and I see the same thing, so I suspect this is actually present on the tape.
However, when I compared the JVC and Toshiba, I noticed that the image from the JVC looks much less sharp, and there's yellow glow around all of the text in the logo. The yellow glow is particularly noticeable above the top bar of the logo. The Toshiba seems to produce a much better image.
On the JVC, I've set: Video Calibration OFF, Picture Control EDIT, Digital R3 OFF, Video Stabilizer OFF.
I've tried turning the line TBC/DNR on and off, with both s-video and composite outputs. I might be able to convince myself there are some small differences between these 4 combinations, but all are clearly much different than the Toshiba. I think the JPGs show this just fine, but am attaching BMPs as well (in the zip file) in case there's any question about compression artifacts.
Any thoughts about what might be going on with the JVC?