JVC VCR seek issues, quality check?
 

I recently decided to convert my parents VHS tapes and have been working to acquire hardware. I've got the following hardware.

JVC HR-S9500U
JVC HR-S9800U
Datavideo TBC-1000
ATI All In Wonder 600 USB

All of this hardware was purchased off of eBay (I tried to find things locally but failed). I noticed a couple things.

1. The Datavideo TBC-1000 seems to work fine? I don't have any video quality issues when utilizing it, and it made the blue JVC screen have a "grid" when played back on my LCD display, but I do not see this nearly as obviously during capture. I don't know what this means, but I'm hoping it's a good thing. Are there specific things I should look for to validate it's functioning as expected?

2. The S9500 seems to have less noise than the S9800. It also seeks with less noise than the S9800. When seeking with the S9800, it has a very noisy bottom 20% of the frame or so. The signal seems garbled. I don't notice this during normal playback. Any ideas what could cause it or how to resolve it?

3. The S9800 is "brighter" but to the point where some scenes actually seem washed out compared to the S9500. I know I can adjust for this during capture, but is this expected? (See attached images)

I've attached few lossless videos and png images to show some comparisons. Sorry they're so short, but I had to keep them under 99mb. I have Calibration off, Stabilization off, R3 off, and TBC on for both VCRs during capture. Any information would be greatly appreciated!

The "grid" is normal. From what I've read in the service manual, the chip that generates the on-screen display (at least in the 9500) only outputs composite video (mixed colour/luminance), so it sends out color output also on the luminance channel when connected with S-Video (separate colur/luminance), which the capture chip will interpret as if it's luminance rather than colour and thus generate this sort of pattern.


Afaik, the 9800 has several "picture modes" which has an impact on how noisy/detailed the picture is, while the 9500 has only edit on (quite noisy)/off(quite smooth). Additionally there is digital noise reduction connected to the TBC/DNR function when it's on. Whether to use Edit mode, and what picture mode to select seems to depend on preference. As for seeking, it may just be that the tracking in seek mode is off (which is separate from normal playback.) Check the manual for how/if it can be adjusted.

Both of these deck have the special JVC dynamic drum which gives much less image disturbance when seeking than on other decks.

Output levels can vary a bit between decks. It is possible to adjust with a special service remote if it's too off, i.e impossible to avoid blown out whites, but that remote is super rare and hard to find. Alternatively if it's very bad it could signify something wrong, got a panasonic AG5700 deck here that has messed up brightness and other issues, and I know the famed AG1980P has similar issues when capacitors go bat but I haven't read about it happening on JVCs.

Thanks for this explanation! Normal video seems fine. This pattern leads me to believe that the TBC is working as expected.

Normal playback looks great. I read some posts saying you can perform manually tracking when seeking, but I have not been able to get this to work. I can manually track during normal playback. Is it possible there are issues with the dynamic drum that would only be apparent during seeking? I've heard some older decks start to produce issues with the dynamic drum.

I'm using auto picture mode on both the 9500 and 9800, not edit mode. It may just be that the 9800 does more/less processing in auto mode than the 9500. Either way, it's a minimal difference that I can only detect when comparing side by side.

After some further testing, I believe I mis-spoke when I said it was blowing out the whites. I had some previous brightness/contrast adjustments applied in VirtualDub and after setting them back to defaults, all the video data is there, I think it was just the capture device/settings blowing the whites out. The video is still brighter, but not to a point that it can't be corrected with brightness/contrast settings.

It seems my only "issue" is with some noise during seeking, which has 0 impact on capturing my videos, so I can live with it. Thanks for the help.