[Limulus]

hello, into dvdr (hobby) authoring since early 2003 myself, still constantly doing transfers video and audio. the quality issue has always been an interesting subject to me. no time to go into all the details here, lots of good stuff being mentioned allready and also some i dont agree with, but when going for the subjective matter of quality i would like to add and recommend this:

if you have an (to you) important vhs source and have some lets say semi-pro equipment from wich you are getting nice results in general:
do multiple transfers!!

from my experience there is no way to have ONE standard set-up which works best for every vhs. it might give some standard "ok" transfer but when wanting the best you will get significantly different results often when doing different tranfers you can compare. this means: change vcr settings, vcrs, cables, filters etc. from the same source vhs!
for example lets take a TBC: TBC1000 here....it gives an inferior result most of the time, in my opinion TBCs (also internal vcr tbcs) mostly fuck up the image in some bad way (then again its needed at points like having a troubled vhs where a non TBC capture gives many dropped frames) BUT i also have a few shows where the dvdr simply looks best when using this device! at other points a cheaper vcr (JVC3500) is far sharper than my JVC 9600, another time my stand alone-recorder dvdr looks better than an DV/PC-transfer encoded 9pass, its kinda.....you never know exactly which transfer works best for the source vhs. so if you are willing to go for this, you gotta take the time to do multiple transfers and compare them. if this effort is not an issue you still could at least do some tests yourself like taking an unimportant vhs and try like 1min captures in different ways (tbc on, tbc off, NR on, NR off....different cables etc.) and compare them exactly on dvdrw and tv(!), then decide what way works best for you and stick to that.