It's more that the NV-HS1000 is a bit older. If you already have a JVC it's probably useful to have something else as an option as LS mentions.
The 9700 is from
around 2000 I think, the service manuals also say late 2000. For the 90s and 2000s JVCs, usually the 2nd number indicates what generation it's from.
Then 9700's competition from Panasonic from the same year would likely be the he NV-HS960 I think.
The
NV-HS1000 was released in 95 or 96 from what I can find, though they may have been produced for a few years. It's not full of SMD electrolytic capacitors like the NTSC AG1980P, though there are few tiny ones on the chroma hybrid module, which seem like a huge pain to replace if they were bad (would be hard enough just to get to them to test them. I've had a bit of issues with the one we got here, especially with the drum assembly it came with which kept giving tons of dropouts. Maybe it's just me being unlucky though.
Then again I haven't been entirely satisfied with the JVCs either, the TBC in all of them seem very prone to cause vertical jumping if signal on the tape is a bit unstable (e.g on a camcorder tape with movement). Additionally, there is something with the drop-out corrected lines on the Philips VR1100 (aka almost hte same as HR-S7700) and lower end HR-J681 that cause them to not line up with the rest of the image, even if passed through something like a panasonic DMR-ES10, it really throws off the internal TBC which takes several lines to recover from the dropout. I don't know if either of these issues are some inherent design thing in the VCRs, or if there is something that goes bad. Somehow, it's the oldest one I got, the 8500 that seems to be working the best, though maybe it's due to it being in very good condition.
