There's still plenty of VCRs to be found in thrift stores, if yours is decrepit. I brought a nice SVHS Sony home for $15 last summer to have as a backup.

One key problem with capturing from VHS is that because it's mechanical and analog, it produces an imprecise video signal that digital capture devices have trouble dealing with. A professional would use a "Time Base Corrector" (TBC for short) to stabilize the signal, which can dramatically improve the quality.

Other capture options include:

standalone DVD recorders; I've come across those in thrift stores, pawn shops, and yard sales for under $20. Some claim to include TBC of some sort, and supposedly some can be used to pass through a corrected video signal to another capture device. Downsides are that the discs sometimes need to be formatted first, and/or finalized after, and video is recorded as MPEG2, so it's not ideal for editing if you copy the disc to the computer later.

TV capture cards and USB devices; these nearly always have inputs for composite and Svideo and audio. Sometimes this capability isn't even mentioned on the box. Some include hardware MPEG encoders, but usually it's best to capture to DV so the video can be edited easily. I've come across ATSC tuners at thrift stores (USB and PCI-E); good computer recyclers like Freegeek will probably have a box full. Hauppauge is a common brand.

Camcorders; some MiniDV and Digital8 camcorders include video inputs. These are reputed to have decent TBC, and they can often pass through the video to Firewire, so the camcorder becomes an outboard Firewire capture device. This requires a Firewire port, obviously. Note that even a camera with a broken CCD or MiniDV mechanism should still work fine.

If you google video capture and TBC and VHS you'll find various helpful discussions. This is kind of a distillation of what I've learned from reading and doing some captures myself.