Mitsubishi HS-MD3000U good for digital transfer?
 

One of these caught my eye, but I understand they don't work with LP or EP tapes. I do have a large number of SP S-VHS tapes to transfer, so it would be useful for that (assuming it's good in general) but could it be used as a passthrough device for another VCR running tapes at other speeds?

As far as I know they lack the line TBC, With problematic tapes you could still need a DVD recorder in passthrough for line issues such as flagging.

Those medical machines are usually nasty (hospital germs! bacteria!), and most "medical VTRs" are SP only playback. These units are ancient boat anchors never intended for this sort of usage. Cheap for a reason.

I actually just bought one of those this weekend to put in my eventual grand comparison of higher-end VCRs. They do have a TBC. Main limitation is SP tapes only as others have mentioned. Though, to be fair, many home VHS tape recordings and commercial releases will be at SP speed. It does have some unique features such as separate Y and C noise reduction and a 3D noise reduction. 3D I believe meaning that it looks at a frame before and after to decide what is likely noise and what likely isn't. That probably won't be your friend if you like film grain and may lose some detail.

Another cool feature is an hours counter (which gives separate readings for time powered on versus time the head drum was actually spinning).

See this video here with a review comparing it to a standard VCR and the 3000U definitely wins there for image stability and less ringing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xoft92VctQY

The VCR he's comparing it to (HS-U778) is also an S-VHS machine and rather well reviewed in terms of "non-TBC machines".

On the reviewer's unit, the head only had 50 hours on it which I don't think would be too atypical given how short most medical procedures would have been to record. Any germs on them should be long dead and certainly worse than touching the handles on public restrooms.

It's also one of the most compact out there being relatively compact and probably 2/3 the width of a typical VCR.

So in summary, if you convert mostly SP tapes, this should produce an image on par (or maybe better depending on how well the noise reduction features work) than the recommended models for maybe 1/3 of the price.

Eventually I'll post reviews of everything with videos to show how much difference there really is between VCRs with line TBCs that I've been able to acquire and pit them against a basic S-VHS machine paired with a ES10 for passthrough.

I see, so its TBC and DNR are menu activated not from the front panel. It looks like a good backup player for SP tapes.

Another interesting bonus is that it removes macrovision by itself. I saw a single obscure post about that elsewhere, but can confirm. That post also talked about "White" Panasonic and JVC models also doing that, but never saw anyone else make that correlation that white/beige professional VCRs tend to remove macrovision on their own. Would be interesting if true, and I don't have others to test haha.

It does have some SMT caps inside which can go bad, but it was manufactured well after the capacitor plague or at least will have a lot newer SMT caps than most VCRs. Some of the SMT caps are super small variants as well that are only like 2mm or 3mm in diameter which I haven't otherwise seen used in VCRs. Manufacturing dates seem to range from 2007 to 2010. It does use lead-free solder which will be annoying if you ever did have to repair anything.

This is not correct. :no2:

Anti-copy (more than just Macrovision brand anti-copy) is not defeated by mere line TBC. There's also multiple types of Macrovision, and multiple types of non-Macrovision. These "defeats/ignores copy protection!" claims have been around for 35+ years now, and are never true (except in cases of a frame TBC that strips and rebuilds that portion of the signal).

People that "test" it are never conducting full experiments, just a few random tapes from their own collection. This is how myths start, how bad data starts (and continues).

Upon deep inspection, even the claims of it being removed are often proven false, there are analog artifact byproducts, such such as molested luma/chroma/etc.

Checked another tape and apparently Rocky II that I just had laying around and did my initial test with, while a commercial release, did not have Macrovision on it to begin with, so that's why I wasn't seeing it, so that's my mistake

I wasn't saying that a line TBC would remove macrovision, I was saying that it looked like this VCR specifically ALSO did vertical blanking, but this is apparently not the case as I retested with some other tapes and macrovision was indeed passed through.

The testing I do to check for macrovision is just using a T-pulse or vertical shift setting that will show the space above the usually viewable area and it's basically looking for the white and black rectangles that vary in brightness.