I got to know a guy that owns a video equipment repair shop and he loaned me one - a really nice JVC player/editor pro deck.

For my Beta tapes I bought an incredible deck on EBay for around $70 and it would play very old tapes that my very high end consumer SLHF900 couldn't even read they had deteriorated so much all all with a much stronger video signal output.

The guy that owned the shop bought the deck from me when I was finished with it as he still gets customer requests to convert old betamax home movies.

Hunt for shops that buy and sell old equipment and I think you will be surprised at how cheaply you can find a machine that originally cost $10,000 for like $70.

Take my word that the better the quality of the tape read and player output the better will be the file captured to your PC.