Hi guys. I'll be on the look out for a VHS deck soon and would like to hear people's opinions on what I should get and what things should I look out for?

Is manual audio control necessary?
Is S-VHS necessary? (Most people don't have that anyway so I assume it's not, or is having SVHS in at least a good thing even if going to VHS)

I take it I'd need HiFi at the least?

I'll be using it to dub off footage and videos that I've made for people and want pretty good quality. I won't be doing bulk work so I guess it doesn't have to be an industrial quality one.

Cheers
Aaron

A lot of people that shoot use a SVHS VCR as a master. Then make VHS copies from that. Regarding which VCR? I don't know. Most of them are built cheap these days. What I do is find and buy old ones that are built like tanks. If they're broken, I get an estimate for repair and then go from there.

Thanks Frank. I myself was thinking of using DVD as a master and then going from there. Would have thought that was better quality, no? I guess it would be a bit more expensive.

Cheers
Aaron

I don't know about that. Although DVD is 480 lines, and SVHS is only 400 lines, I don't know how DVD to VHS footage would compare with SVHS to VHS. Isn't DVD highly compressed? I'll have to let someone else jump in who has more knowledge about this.