I can swing the money for a pretty good VCR, so I'm not worried about secondhand. Besides, I tend to buy hardware new, media used. Anyway, auto-tracking has made some big leaps in the past few years, and a good manual tracking knob is the only thing I'd gain by getting an old one. Like my VHS of Shock Treatment, which met an unfortunate end in a VW trunk for a Florida summer, was able to play almost flawlessly on one my folks recently bought.

>>Secondly, is there any reason why you're VHS ripping when say, >>DVD's of the said shows might be available?

Because there aren't. Unless you bring your laptop through a time machine with you to do an RGB upscan of The Space Giants off of TBS in the day. When I say FX shows, I mean, like, the newest thing is Ninja Sentai Kakuranger. Old-ass TV commercials, Johnny Socko and his Flying Robot, Street Fighter II (the Korean live action TV series) and so on.

Thanks for the help, though. I wanted to make sure there wasn't some amazing development in VCR recently, as I don't follow AV stuff that closely.