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Hello everyone,
I'm sort of a newbie here - although about a year ago I benefitted from the experience of a couple of members, in order to fix a broken Pana NV-HS1000 including Volksjager & cedricm, whom I wish to thank again. Well, like probably many other members here, I have a bunch of VHS tapes (mostly PAL) that I am digitizing over the course of several years (14000 tapes, 5000 down, 9000 to go).
I purchased a couple of VCRs, and am mostly sticking to a couple of Panasonic NV-HS1000 (pretty easy and cheap to find in Germany - I'm from Belgium)... but I have a few hundreds of VHS tapes recorded as S-VHS by drilling the extra hole (which I used in order to record teletext/subtitles information from BBC/C4 and the like)... and I did NOT manage to get good quality from these on NV-HS1000. I thought that, like some people wrote on the web, it's due to the inferior magnetic coercivity of these VHS tapes, being not S-VHS grade... but still I found a used JVC HR-S9500MS, in apparently good shape, from 120€ !! Tried that one, and bingo, these tapes play great (don't know why, there shouldn't be any difference, since the SVHS-ET circuitry is only used for recording, and not for playing), including teletext/subtitles that I'm able to capture using GBPVR. This dream lasted about 6 days and 15 digitized recordings... before that VCR ran into some trouble.
Suddenly, there's a large blurry horizontal zone (about 1/8th of screen height), which I manage - by using precise tracking - to mostly get outside of the visible area, but still I get those pesky "lines" on the top and the bottom of the picture. Looks like the signal is weak or something (sorry, I'm not into electronics, and I apologize for all the crap i'm writing here.... really sorry). I never never get stable hifi sound (hifi sound comes back but only for a fraction of a second).
I thought: maybe some dirt from last tape either got stuck somewhere, or broke some part of the circuitry, or some hair from one of my cats (why are VCRs so interesting to cats?) got stuck in there.
So I tried cleaning all the heads and the tape path (using chamois on the video heads, Q-tips on the control & mono audio head), gently blew some canned air all over (without taking it apart - i'm not good at that)... to no avail !
I tried to find local repair shops in Belgium... but I only could find an apparently very capable shop (technoland) that does not repair VHS anymore, but could offer me a technician at 75€ per hour, plus tax, without any guarantee of success (I'd have to pay anyhow), and without free estimate !
I downloaded the schematics and service manual. But last time I took a VCR apart, I could not get the front loader to work again (too bad, since it was simply a matter of a belt that had got loose)... so I'm kind of cautious especially with such a marvelous device. So... I'd prefer not to have to take the front panel & everything apart if possible, and/or to find someone in Europe to send it to. Or maybe the symptoms point toward failed electronics, and in that case, I'll only have to cry and shell another 250-300€ for an equivalent S-VHS beast.
What do you think?
And thanks again for a wonderful forum.
Last edited by MadMovieBuff; 01-17-2016 at 09:57 AM.
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