Golden age of VHS (composite) VCR?
 

What was the golden age of regular VHS VCRs? And are Panasonic Omnivision (blueline) considered the best of this type of regular VHS VCR? Until what year were they good before the quality started to go down?

Could this yield very good results: Regular VHS VCR from the sweet spot year --> output composite to a Panasonic ES-10/ES-15 passthrough --> output S-Video to a capture device. Would the decomb in the ES-10-ES-15 take that composite image and split it up into chrome and luma and deliver it to the capture card even better than an average S-VHS VCR would have?

Panasonic VHS VCRs in 70s/80s were fine, probably best.

Panasonic VHS VCRs are among the worst in the 90s, JVC not much better -- those were definitely not the S-VHS VCRs! In the 90s, the best are Sharp (late 90s), some Sony, some Philips/Magnavox (early 90s), some Toshiba. Stuff from "old brands" like RCA, GE, Emerson, Westinghouse, etc, were mostly rebadged by no-names (Funai, others).

All you really had in the 2000s was Funai junk, sold under many brands.

It never worked that way, It was always high end VCRs and low end VCRs at every era, S-VHS VCRs are the best for capturing and the later generations among them are the better after they started using system on the chip and digital processing. Almost anything prior to late 80's is not recommended for capturing nowadays.

In decombing a LaserDisc, my S-VHS JVC VCR in passthrough mode is noticeably better than my ES-10.

Hmmmmm. I know people use certain camcorders for line TBC passthrough - Or are you just saying that it'll turn composite into S-Video (without line TBC effect) better than the ES10?

Passing the composite signal through the JVC results in less rainbowing than with the ES-10.

The late 90s/early 00s JVC SVHS decks have a pretty good adaptive Y/C comb filter built into them. The Panasonic AG-1980 comes in second as it does have some lag detecting onscreen motion and is an older design.

This piqued my curiosity as I was wondering what the effects of separating chroma from luma would yield. So I decided to test using the analog output on my PS2 - I'm well aware this is probably not the best representative of a correctable signal, but I don't have any VHS sources that I'm willing to wear out in the name of science.

First I tried a direct composite into the AIW. Then composite into the ES15, and composite out of that to the AIW. There didn't seem to be much difference.

Then I tried composite into the ES15 and S-Video out to the AIW. I was mostly expecting some kind of garbage in garbage out situation, but there's definitely something happening when it gets converted to S-Video. Take a look at the health bars - I couldn't tell you what's happening on a technical level, but the checkerboards are cleaned up and it's closer to how it would look via the PS2's component output. (Sadly I don't have an PS2 S-Video cable to compare this against.)

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ES-15 comb filter is better than the comb filter of AIW. Not a surprise.

Those checkerboards are called dot crawl, an artifact most commonly associated with poor comb filtering.