From my experience in transferring hundreds of VHS tapes ranging from poor to excellent condition and having used panasonic, sony and other VCRs, there is nothing else I would recommend than JVC VCRs - I would avoid COMBOS as the components used are very cheap and often the VCR used is of marginal quality and provides very poor performance for old tapes (particularly dubs). My JVC VCRs handles even the worst tape and provids better picture enhancement overall.