Not one VCR is best for all tapes. For SP speed tapes like home movies, the JVC SVHS and DVHS decks equipped with JVC's "Digipure" TBC/noise reduction from the late 90s-early 00s have some of the best picture quality out there. The Mitsubishi HS-HD2000U DVHS deck is another recommended model. Expect to pay upwards of $200 for a working deck on ebay. The list of model numbers can be found here:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/foru... The Panasonic AG-1980P is best for EP/SLP tapes and is also better behaved with VHS-C tapes in the motorized adapter. The JVCs tend to have problems with the VHS-C adapters. The downside of the AG-1980 is that it is VERY prone to electrical problems. Almost all of them need to have full capacitor replacement, otherwise they have problems with herringbone noise, loss of color output, and "barber pole" patterns on the video output. Sometimes the deck even stops accepting tapes. Repair involves replacing close to 100 surface mount capacitors.
For capture, find an old Pentium 4 with an AGP slot running Windows XP and an ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder with the Rage Theater 100/200chip. They have excellent analog capture quality and the ADC doesn't do any sharpening or muck up the video with AGC. Both of which are common problems on modern capture cards, including ATI's own PCI "TV Wonder" cards.
To avoid frame dropping, you need an external TBC (different from the TBC in the VCR) acting as a frame sync. They also tend to strip Macrovision off of tapes *wink* *wink*. More info here:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/foru...