Sr-v101us quality issue?
 

I am not sure if I'm just expecting better, or if there is actually a quality issue.

I am relatively new to digitizing, so i am unsure of all the terminology.

My workflow:
sr-v101us > se-500 (I know, best i can do for now) > ati usb 2.0 tv wonder

It seems like all of my attempted captures are blurry. I'm not sure if its some sort of chroma shift or something? I have tested a number of vhs movies with roughly the same results. I have also tried several s-video cables, with the same results. I have also tried different capture cards, and without the se-500. The only other vcr i have is a lower end sony, so the picture quality is even worse. I notice it the most around the edges of people or objects, almost like the colors blend together. When you resize the video, it makes it even more noticeable.

I have about 50 vhs-c family video tapes to digitize, but i have been testing everything with normal movies. I want to make sure i have all the steps down before starting this project.

Could this be a capacitor issue on the vcr? or is this completely normal for a vhs to look like this?

You might want to see if the VCR has an Edit mode in the menus that you can enable. I think what your captures are missing is essentially "grain" which often gets smoothed out by noise reduction circuits. Could also be that you are expecting too much out of NTSC VHS since these are your first captures.

Your VHS-C tapes could throw some additional stability issues into the mix especially if they happen to be anything other than SP speed. I'm not sure how good the SE-500 is at correcting those issues. I have a SE-800 to play around with and I have to say the build quality inside is pretty top tier, but I haven't tested to see how well it works as a TBC just yet.