JVC HR-S7900U Chroma Bleed?
 

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?

The chroma on the JVC seems to be shifted up a line compared to the toshiba, doesn't look like it's otherwise bleeding out more. The Y/C filter in the VC500 is pretty crap though, so you get a lot of "chroma dots" which makes it a bit hard to compare. Why the chroma would be shifted I don't know. The Toshiba is sharper, but also has noticeable ringing to the right of sharp edges, it sharpens the image much more by default. The JVC decks tend to produce a less sharpened picture by default, which can look a little more blurry but also avoids the ringing, it's a tradeoff. The VC500 has a sharpness setting that can be adjusted, it's a bit high by default.

Some of the later (samsung-made) toshibas have an adjustable sharpness setting as well, not sure if this one does though. You can turn on R3 on the JVC for a bit more sharpness on that one if you find the output overly soft (There's also a sharp picture mode but that both blurs and sharpens and tends to destroy detail.).

The effect of the TBC in the JVC should be quite noticeable on text. Without it on you will get a lot of horizontal wiggling between frames, the TBC will fix this for most tapes.