VHS cameras wothy of purchase for digitizing?
 

Hi all, hope you are well. Lots of great info on this forum.

However I couldn't find much discussion about VHS cameras as a part of the workflow. I have the opportunity to buy a good condition Panasonic M10 and was wondering if it's worth it? Does it have some form of TBC? It would only cost about 30$.


Thanks for any input!

Camcorders are a pain broadly, great when they work but can be an absolute pain once they act up, they're usually very fiddly to work on and often they're nobbled for playback duty.

This is a bit of a different beast, and it might be worth a shot, but by its nature, it's going to have been jolted around a lot so it might need some tweaking to playback properly from other tapes not recorded on it.

Camcorders just go in the electrical waste here, I don't care what they are, I'm personally never impressed by them, so my personal view is that they're all junk, but that's just a personal 'thing' in full disclosure. It may or may not be technically true, I'm certain many are more than happy with them. I gave away load of them last year on here and a few other places.

Of course, this is only risk, and I don't know your skillset, if it's cheap enough for you to give it a go - I don't think it'll be a startling performer though and almost certainly won't have any sort of TBC.

My instinct is that it's probably no better at playback than a mid-market standard VHS machine at best, just with the added complication of being a nightmare to service and adjust.

$30 is cheap though, it's a few beers, so if you want it to fiddle with why not? I don't think it'll be very impressive though.

Whether it has TBC or not a user manual can confirm that for you but generally speaking VHS format is better played with a full size home deck.

If it is in good condition and you want to shoot VHS format video with a shoulder camcorder it may be OK but you may need to buy a new battery. (The lead-acid gel cells may last for 5 years or so when new.) However, I would not recommend it as a playback unit for VHS tapes. The ergonomics are wrong, it lacks s-video output, and is of an age where maintenance/repair, parts, and service will be hard to find.

Besides the other stuff the manual seems to indicate that it's SP only (at least if it's the european variant), so if you have tapes recorded in LP or EP it probably won't be able to play them back properly. No mention of TBC in the manual. Given the age (seems to be from 1989?) and the fact that it's not SVHS it would be very unlikely for it to feature that.

Many many thanks, very enlightening! I have decided against it after having a look at the picture quality on youtube. Would have been a somewhat fun project to shoot a video on VHS but my time is better spent on creating the workflow for digitizing old tapes...Cheers!

Yeah, they're probably quite intriguing and it's the sort of thing I like to play with as a nerdy hobby, but a cheap local free-ads find machine is probably going to yield no worse playback quality.

They're a pain in the bottle and glass to adjust and service too.