Mitsubishi HS-U775 S-VHS good estate sale find?

[HDEditor]

Found an estate sale with a Mitsubishi HS-U775 S-VHS for sale.

Other than confirming it will play a tape without damage, and good load and eject sequences, is this worth getting for digital capture?

[Haunted_TBC]

I’m not sure, since this appears to be a circa 2000(?) unit without a line Time Base Corrector. I do know that LegacyBox/Southtree has at least one of those HS-U775s, but that business is not a good example for any of this.

[aramkolt]

The U775 is pretty well reviewed from what I've seen. Only downside is really the lack of TBC, but depending on the rest of your setup, captures could still be pretty good.

The U775 uses the same mechanism as the HS-HD2000U (which does have a line TBC) and it's also the same mechanism that's in the HS-MD3000 (also has line TBC, but can only play SP speed tapes). The MD3000's are kind of cool because they have hours counters in the menus and have independent and variable luma and chroma noise reduction that is also independent of the TBC being on or off. Other potential downside of the MD3000's is that they do use a large amount of surface mount caps, but I haven't seen those be bad on them. They were usually manufactured in 2007 or later, so that should have been past the capacitor plague times and they probably used better brands of surface mount caps than most given that the machine was a $2000+ "medical grade" device.