Turn off Panasonic VHS Crystal View Control (CVC)?
 

I own a VHS (PAL) Panasonic NV-JF630 HI-FI with the "Crystal Video Control" (CVC) enhancement feature. From my experience, it works best with LP recordings; the SP recordings tend to be a bit on the soft side.

Is there any way to turn it off and get the video "as is"? A friend of mine lent me his Sony SLV-SX700 HI-FI with its own enhancement feature. However, the SX700 has the ability to turn off that feature in the menus. The results are great!

On the other hand, his SX700 isn't good at playing old mono tracks (it filters low-end audio band whenever it sees fit), whereas my JF630 does wonders with old mono tracks.

Basically, if my JF630 could disable CVC, it'd be the best of both worlds for recovering old mono VHS recordings with my ATI USB capture card (the good ones). Is there any way to achieve this?

I've never managed to find a way to manually turn it off it on newer models that don't have a dedicated button for it. Some of the multi-system variants came with a button but haven't seen any PAL ones that did. A few (like several of the SVHS ones and the FJ710 you note in the other thread) had a soft/sharp/auto setting in the menu but even that disappeared on the last SVHS ones.

On the older Panasonics up to the 1998 models (e.g NV-HD620, NV-HD630 European marked models) the sharpness stuff is controlled by a voltage going into one of the video IC pins so in theory someone with some electronics knowledge could maybe jerry rig something on models that didn't come with cvc on/off button already. On the later ones it's controlled via serial communication so would be very complicated unless there is some hidden way to change it.

It is possible to calibrate the function on the later models in the service menu (it also works on other models from the time like the SVHS ones but don't know if it changes anything on those as it's not noted in the manual.) which may or may not help.