I'm sure if this is the place to ask, but can anyone recommend a DV tape deck for playing back tapes recorded from different camcorders. I've got an old Sony and JVC DV cameras that have seen there better days and are not worth fixing, but when I play the recorded tapes from those cameras in my Sony HDR-HC3, the recordings seem a lot more grainy than what I remember from the orginal cameras. There were also some tapes that were recorded in LP mode.

I've heard before that playing tapes recorded in different cameras don't always give the best results. I was wondering if there is a tape deck that has the ability to compensate for these differences and produce a good picture for archiving to my computer.

I can only speak to my experience with the Sony DSR-11 - it's a great deck though somewhat pricey. It doesn't play LP recordings, though - something generally true of pro(sumer) equipment.

grainyness is typically something you get from analogue noise (i.e. CCD chips in low light, analogue tape formats) and therefore is very unlikely to come from DV tape problems. if there is a problem (drop-outs) with digital tape it usually results in catastrophic image failure - you would see big square blocks missing or corrupted in the image (i have never seen DV problems introduce noise). so provided you get no drop-outs, you can be sure that what you get is 100% the same as what you recorded. on any DV deck.

my advice would be to get the cheapest DV camcorder you can find (you can pick one up for about 150$ or less now) and capture from that. assuming there are no drop-outs the quality of the captured material will be identical with that from a much more expensive DV deck.