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I'm looking to do a head to head comparison of about 10 different professional TBCs from with manufacturing dates ranging from 1989 to 2005 that I've acquired over time. This comparison will be done with all of these units on the same source VHS tapes. There's a lot of debate about which (if any) professional TBCs work well for consumer VHS and and I think this will provide a lot of useful information to everyone considering buying one of these for their capture chain. Testing will also include heavy use of pattern generators, vectorscope, and waveform monitor data to show how each unit shifts color or if significant noise is added as the video passes through. Jitter and some other measurements such as signal to noise ratio will also directly be measured with a Tektronix VM700T.
What I need help with is sourcing donated VHS tapes that have significant timebase errors to test and show how certain models succeed/fail on different defects to make a proper comparison for "worst case scenarios." Eventually I'll post the head to head TBC testing results to YouTube for everyone to see using short tape snippets showing how each performed on various time base errors of the donated tapes.
I am looking for VHS Tapes that have any of the following:
-Significant vertical jitter (entire image moves up and down rapidly)
-Give MANY dropped frames compared to most tapes that capture fine with the same setup.
-Have vertical roll.
Tapes would ideally be original recordings from either a VCR recording from television programming or a an original camcorder-recorded tape. I doubt there'd be many timebase errors on original commercially-released videos, but I'd be interested in those tapes as well if they are having the problems listed above. Second generation tapes (dubs/recordings of a recording) can often have timebase errors from the original tape baked in and aren't usually improved much by TBCs - see videos of "VHS generation loss" on YouTube if you're curious how errors can accumulate over copying many times.
I do not want:
-Moldy tapes - have white stuff visible on the wound tape viewed through the transparent windows
-Tapes with heavy/consistent horizontal lines of static/snow - could mean sticky shed syndrome or misaligned at time of recording
-Tapes recorded in a format other than NTSC (as I only have NTSC players)
-Tapes that you want back
If the actual content of the donated tape is important to you, I can digitize the problem areas of the tape and send the captured file back to you for free (using whatever TBC I have that corrects it best).
If you have any such tapes with significant time base errors as described that you want to donate and possibly have converted for free, private-message me and I'll message back with info on where to send it.
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