JVC SR-VS30U Dual Format S-VHS & Pro-DV Recorder

This deck was a great idea; an affordable mini-DV and VHS combo with firewire port. It allowed you to caputre old VHS tapes as well as miniDV tapes into your computer. Connecting a DVD player and recording into a computer was also very easy. However the firewire port is extremely fragile and usually only last about three years. I worked in a television station that had 15 of these decks; after five years we had one left that worked. Even if the firewire port is working it is rather difficult to force Windows into connecting a driver to the deck. JVC doesn't provide drivers and it often takes manually playing around with different drivers before finding the right one to force a connection. Macs had no problem identifiying the decks but the new editing software has trouble capturing both video and audio at high quality.

PLUS: Original cost was $899.00, I'm assuming the price is doubled by this vendor because they have been discontinued. But trust me there is a reason JVC discontinued them. You are better off buying a cheap camera to capture and an AVDC Grass Valley Analog Converter to capture old VHS tapes or DVDs; total cost for both is $600.00

I was lucky enough to stumble upon a JVC SR-VS30 deck at the local Goodwill and snagged it for an astonishing $24.99. It has worked perfectly with FCP5 on my iMac, and I was familiar with it after using the same model in the edit bays at my college; I've been able to capture miniDV and VHS tapes for myself and clients without any problems. And although SD is well on its way out, I'm definitely keeping the deck for future digitizing purposes. There's always someone who wants an old family vacation transferred to DVD.

Buy JVC SR-VS30U Dual Format S-VHS & Pro-DV Recorder Now