Posted by Bill Ding on 01/12/31 11:38

"Alf. van der Weg" <a.vdw@kamphuis.net> had too much fun using his
computer, entered into a strange trance-like state and began to
channel Foghorn Leghorn, leader of the Chicken People, and, mistaking
his keyboard for a trough of oversized corn niblets, began pecking at
it vigorously, his nose pressing the following keys:

>I'm trying to copy my old VHS tapes to DVDs, but a lot of them give bad
>copies.
>
>I bought a Toshiba DR-4 DVD recorder, maybe it's just not good enough. But
>some of the tapes copy pretty well and some have really crappy pictures
>with flickering and bad color.
>
>Am I doing something wrong or do I need a better recorder, or what?


I posted a similar message earlier, asking about the Sima that a
couple of people have mentioned to you here.

I got no response, but I have been digging around, and here's what I
found:

Yes (according to a fair number of reviewers) the Sima CT2 (or,
better, the Sima SCC or SCC2 - similar units, but with control knobs)
will take care of your problem.

You put the Sima between your VHS deck and the DVD recorder (I'm also
looking the the DR4), and presto! your signal is cleaned up. For best
results you probably need to use S-Video signal, but it's (apparently)
not completely necessary, so if your VHS deck doesn't have S-Video,
you can still use the regular RCA port.

If you want to back up your shiny new DVDs, you plug your DVD player
into the VHS player. This is important, as several people found out
that plugging the DVD player into the Sima still resulted in the
recorder either refusing to record (it's basically a computer with a
DVD read/write installed) or giving copy-protection crap in the
recording, but plugging the DVD player into the VHS deck let the
signal pass through cleanly.

I am saying "apparently" to this because I haven't taken the plunge
yet - I do want to use the S-Video and my old Sony VHS deck doesn't
have it, so I'm looking at $150 for the DR4, about $100 for the SCC,
and another $110 for a JVC VHS deck that does have S-Video... and
having just had to pony up for property taxes and whacking great
utility bills, I'm going to have to save up a couple of months for
these toys.

Incidentally, in my system I have my DVD player running through the
VHS deck, and sombunall DVDs demonstrate the annoying alternating
light and dark picture that is apparently one of the copy protection
schemes, and it looks like the SCC will take care of that problem... I
may go ahead and get that first and see... if it takes care of that
problem (as it seems likely that it would) it seems pretty likely that
it'll work for the recording, too.

HTH


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