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FrankT said:
Blast it! Well I'm going to have to send that player back now, aren't I?
That's probably for the best anyway. Combi players tend not to be of very high quality. Some of the best VHS players are the the 'prosumer' decks made by Panasonic, JVC and the likes. I myself use a Panasonic SVHS deck with an on-board time base corrector (TBC), and it performs much better than the several bog-standard VHS players, including a mid-range Sony deck, that I had used before. Some consider an external TBC essential, too, but I ended up selling mine because it was introducing momentary tearing problems and dropped frames once every 30 minutes or so. If your tapes are in good condition then an external TBC probably won't be necessary anyway.
You'll get best results using a PC capture device so that you can produce a median of multiple captures of each tape for the best results. I use a lossless codec for capture, and it still produces very large (40GB+) files at 720x576 resolution. If you have a desktop PC with a bit of hard drive space to spare, PC capture is absolutely the way to go. With a laptop its trickier because the hard drives are slower, which can mean dropped frames, but still very possible with SD capture.
If you post your PC specs, we can help advise on the options available.