I have a huge array of VHS tapes lying around, from the 80's to the present, resulting in 100's of tapes.
The convenience of accessing digital media is appealing. However, over the years I've grown a dislike for digital formats especially camcorder - dark, bland and uninspiring; conversely the recordings of my Mediterranean trips on old Hi-8 tapes seemed to portray much more color vibrancy, and light levels despite the lack of resolution. I still preferred it to high-quality digital recorders that could handle Mpeg 4 formats.
Alas, there's only so much time you can allocate to fast-forwarding/rewinding tapes, and naturally they deteriorate over time and the machines themselves break down. Plus, younger family members are only used to distributing stuff in a digital format..show them a Super-VHS recorder and they look at you as though you've arrived from the past in Delorian, complete with flux capacitor lol.
So digital is inevitably the way to go. Now comes the question of which route to take: PC or other. I've never had much faith in PC-based capture solutions due to quality, stability and compatibility issues. So Instead of spending £100's I just opted for a domestic DVD video recorder. The device was made by Lite-On and cost around £100, supporting single-layer DVD+R media. The highest-quality was HQ giving 1HR of footage. I was very impressed with the quality - Mpeg 2 is good enough for my uses.
Such machines seem to have excellent video filtering hardware, and some can be updated to overcome Macrovision difficulties as well as offer the ability to play Region 1 disks. With these devices you effectively do away with the capturing hurdles associated with PC solutions - and naturally you get to archive your source material before you do any post-processing.
So given a choice between an expensive DVD video recorder and a half-decent PC card, I'd choose the former any day. I don't think digital is all it's cracked upto be in terms of quality, not just yet but you can't live in the past forever I guess..
p.s. Going down the local video store
S in the 80's to rent out all the VHS horror films before they were banned and before the days of politically-correct mush..happy days