Our family tried S-VHS players and VCRs back in the day, but ultimate found them to fall short of top-of-the-line VHS VCRs.
S-VHS decks weren't necessarily any better than VHS ones, and the two formats are incompatible.
Mitsubishi, Panasonic, and Sony made the best VHS VCRs, IIRC. The best ones for capture maybe different, but this is what I recall for analog NTSC playback. S-Video connectors, if you can get them may help, but not always.
If I were going green-field the design of a VHS/S-VHS VCR from scratch today, I use some sort of solid-state helical-scan-equivalent head that can over-capture tape domains, pre-process data to align scan lines per PAL or NTSC, and output unencrypted HDMI.
S-VHS decks weren't necessarily any better than VHS ones, and the two formats are incompatible.
Mitsubishi, Panasonic, and Sony made the best VHS VCRs, IIRC. The best ones for capture maybe different, but this is what I recall for analog NTSC playback. S-Video connectors, if you can get them may help, but not always.
If I were going green-field the design of a VHS/S-VHS VCR from scratch today, I use some sort of solid-state helical-scan-equivalent head that can over-capture tape domains, pre-process data to align scan lines per PAL or NTSC, and output unencrypted HDMI.