JVC SVHS player looks worse than Sony VHS?
 

I bought a Sony VHS player (SLV-N88) for $10. I decided to test it against my JVC SVHS player (SR-VS30), which has line TBC built-in. I used a VHS tape that recorded TV circa 1990. It may have been recorded in EP mode. So, not great quality.

The results of my comparison test were worrying, and I'd appreciate some feedback. Because I think my JVC SVHS player has a problem. The Sony was sharper, or at least didn't suffer from horizontal lines (not sure the correct term) that made text more blurry.

Capture workflow: JVC SR-VS30 (TBC off, DNR on) -- Panasonic ES-16 (Canadian version of ES-15) -- ATI AIW 9800XT -- VirtualDub HuffYuv. And I did the same workflow for the SONY VHS player, except the Sony has no line TBC built in, and I used a composite cable for video signal—whereas with the JVC SVHS player I used an S-Video cable.

I then played the videos side by side using video-compare.exe. I did not process the videos in any way. I did a screen capture of the video-compare window and saved as mp4. You can get a sense of the issue by simply looking at the jpg.

Is that your first capture with the VS30? I have had something like 5 VS30's over the years, but haven't seen anything quite like that. I would think you'd have noticed those lines quite a while ago? How does the JVC look with the line TBC turned on and without the ES16 in the path? Could also be a EP speed thing that's confusing the JVC as some tape speeds on some machines weren't always played back as well on machines other than the ones that recorded them. Could just be that the Sony is doing a better job of interpreting that specific tape maybe?

You can easily see recording mode on the JVC LCD.

No, it is not. In fact, it's softer. JVC is sharper, but NR appears heavy on this tape. (Use EDIT.)

What you have here is a tape with bad timing, resulting in line-length errors. It's adjacent to tearing. The ES16 is clearing it up on the Sony, and I bet the Sony would tear with the ES16 removed.

The JVC line TBC is on, not off. The line TBC is having trouble locking on to the shortened line, unable to discern line is actually the image start. This onyl happens with the line TBC engaged, and is one of the only weaknesses of the JVC line TBC. (The Panasonic field TBC can fair better, but it's not guaranteed.) The Panasonic ES10/15 type is suggested due to anti-tearing (and it is NOT a TBC replacement), as well as some adjacent errors like this one.

It's not off here.

It's not just the layman jitter, but the lack of chroma noise beyond the Picture Mode NORM/AUTO setting (NR).

If you're saying the menu shows it to be off, then you have some of really weird error in the machine. While not impossible, odd stuff can happen, especially due to power fail/overage/underrage (ie, not properly using UPS)

While we've spoken many times in the past, I don't believe this is one of my machines (checks record, nope), as my test tapes would have immediately caught that. So where did it come from?

This is myth.

When a quality VCR cannot play a tape, it's actually pretty rare for the "original" machine to do so either. In almost all cases, the "original" machine was misaligned at the time of recording. But gravity causes continual misalignment, and the odds of an "original" machines from decades ago being in the same condition is zero. What can happen is the "original" machine is still close to the misalignment to be within tracking range for the tape, but the tape still rarely plays well.

For best quality, for tapes recorded misaligned, you must "break"/misalign a dweck to match. I have a misalignment deck strictly for this purpose. One that's both easy to realign, and is A+ on my gradingf scale.

Neither one looks better than the other, It's either the DVD recorder messing the signal, The video processing used to compare the captures or both, There is some compression and pseudo de-interlacing going on. If you have doubts about the machines post lossless raw captures here without DVD, without processing and we'll let you know which one is better and why.