S-VHS battle: JVC HR-S8600 vs Panasonic NV-HS960EG
 

I've been trying to put some money aside so that I might one day be able to finally acquire a S-VHS VCR unit.

I found good things about the JVC HR-S8600 with such features as "Dynamic Drum", as well as being well-built and with good control over picture control (although I'm not sure if it can disable it so I can get a "as is" image).

https://vcrshop.com/product/vcr/vide...vc-hr-s8600-3/

However, JVC S-VHS models tend to bundle the line TBC and 3D DNR on the same control button, and I'd rather have the ability to decided which function I wanted to active.


Then comes the Panasonic NV-HS960EG, a model with separate buttons for line TBC and 3D DNR. However, I don't know about the performance of its line TBC compared to the JVC. Also, the Panasonic only has 3 picture modes: "AUTO", "SHARP" and "SOFT". The manual makes no mention of being able to disable the picture control.

https://vcrshop.com/product/vcr/vide...-tbc-3d-dnr-7/


As you see, I'm in a bit of a conundrum. :confused:

The 8600 MS version is a good machine especially for retail tapes( SP)(pal,secam,ntsc tested) . For Ep NTSC tapes my jvc svhs TS1U does much better (The image is very raw and needs serious denoising on chroma planes).

Dynamic drum serves no purposes, only ok for a clean pause/frame by frame image.
One of its key features is the transcoder (pal,secam) which can be handy, it can fail though, like weird horizontal blue bars depending on the tape (i'm pretty sure MV has something to do with that)

And indeed: b.e.s.t system (check tape tension), manual tracking with the remote, the full set of pictures mode (auto,norm, edit (for a "as is" picture ), sharp+/-). In practice you only use norm or edit really


The Panasonic i don't know, never used but i'm aware of separate noise reduc / tbc functions and that's a good thing

I thought the edit mode turned on was bad for capturing video, as it usually results in grainy video?

Also, I forgot to add the Panasonic HS1000, which seems like a HS960 but with physical controls over lots of options. Is it like this?

There have been a few posts where the Dynamic Drum gets a bad rap because the mechanism breaks; better do osme searching about that.

The HS1000 is from a few years before the HS960 and doesn't have the sophisticated digital process stuff of the HS960,(also found in the HS950, HS850 (no TBC), HS860 (same as hs960 sans some editing stuff)) It uses the older K mechanism (same as HS950 and the US AG 1980P) which is a bit more beefy than the simplified Z mechanism in the later models.

RE the HR-S8600, the one I have (EU variant) is generally nice, but it does seem to have some slight luma ghosting between frames even with TBC off and EDIT on. (Also lately it's developed some linear audio issues but that might some bad grounding from me messing with it)I haven't used any of the digital process panasonics like the HS960 (only older and later panasonic SVHS decks) so no idea how those compare.