[actionfromafar]

You could always take the best hardware of the era, and capture from that. If you were talking about decks. I'm not sure about playback - the output from vhs-decode looks pretty darn good to me, but I'm not an expert at all in composite video gear.

[iisan7]

Right, my language was sloppy but I meant two things-- the quality will still be dependent on the hardware chain, and I should expect that a 'bit perfect' capture of a VHS tape will usually be inferior to one captured from a vintage pro deck. And then regarding processing, I'm not a professional, but I've done several successful restorations using virtualdub and avisynth, and on some degraded tapes I couldn't do nearly as well as whatever magic was going on in the vhs to dvd section of the JVC SR-MV50.

[xattt]

Even the best VHS decks from the 80s/90s, which would have been used in production environments and thus “well worn”, would have wear-related quality issues.

[actionfromafar]

But that’s the beauty of vhs-decode. The transport mechanism needs to be stable and the head clean. The rest of the player doesn’t matter.

[xattt]

My impression was that the transport mechanism would have seen the most wear.