My trusty top jobby Akai VHS has had enough. It plays fine but I suspect that the recording head is shafted. (Quoted £100+ to repair).
Purchase required.
Read a lot of the postings below and truly affordable and correct format CD-R seems some way off.
What about D-VHS ? What sort of budget would I need for this ? Is S-VHS no longer recommendable due to the forthcoming advancements in home recording technology ?
Should I go and spend my £500-600 on a top range but standard VHS machine ? Could I get as lot more benefit for a little more money ?
I appreciate that this isn't exactly the right forum, but trust somebody here might speak a little bit of sense re. D-VHS and CD-R.
Answers on the back of a postcard or sealed down envelope please.

SORRY....... !
Kept blabbing in that posting about CD-R!
Obviously I meant DVD-R !!

I suggest that you have a look at the thread headed
'DVD Players / VCR's'
in this discussion group. It has some discussion on the issue of DVD and D-VHS

The one thing that would bother me is that D-VHS has been around for a while and does not seem to be making much of a breakthrough. The cost of the hardware is still in the £1000 category and there are no signs that anyone is going to sell pre-recorded D-VHS, which means that you are stuck with VHS picture quality for pre-recorded material.
You might be better off buying a cheap VHS VCR and waiting until the R-DVD issue is sorted out and one format becomes established, and the hardware gets cheaper. This shouldn't take more than a couple of years!

You could have a look at a couple of S-VHS machines from the likes of JVC and Philips for around £300 or less.
Look through the ads in What Video

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Arial, Helvetica">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Zog:
Should I go and spend my £500-600 on a top range but standard VHS machine ? Could I get as lot more benefit for a little more money?
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
If you use your VCR mainly for playing back pre-recorded material, I can't see any benefit in D-VHS. As Michael Haddock wrote, there are no pre-recorded D-VHS tapes yet.

The situation is different if you use your VCR mainly for recording from digital TV and DVD. I recently bought a D-VHS recorder and I am really impressed by the picture quality when copying a DVD. I can't see any difference between the DVD original and the D-VHS tape. It is really 100% the same picture quality. However the Dolby Digital sound cannot be recorded, so the D-VHS just has hifi stereo sound quality.

Since I use my D-VHS only for recording from DVD or digital TV, I think it was worth spending £1000 for a D-VHS machine instead of £600 for a top range standard VHS machine.

I'd spend £1000 on buying a decent programmable VCR (like the sony) and a sony DVD player. I don't think D-VHS will survive/last. But that's just my opinion.

agreed but not a sony vcr as they are notoriously bad at making vcr's