As we've been talking about VHS in the last few threads, I thought i'd ask for help on this problem.
My VHS player seems to developed a permanent fuzzy effect lately. It's plugged in to a 42" inch smart TV and still works alright. It's a DVD/VHS combi and the fuzziness appears both on VHS and DVD playback.
Tapes recorded in 2004-2005 play excellent but are fuzzy and where it says "no signal" when the machine isn't playing there's a transparent white shadow under the text. Is this a scart issue?
Do you mean the machine is on but not playing when you get the transparent shadow or is the machine off altogether? If its off altogether and you still get the shadow, that can't be a SCART input issue.
Normally issues with SCART playback are almost always caused by the pins not making full connection. On a lot of modern TVs they may not use a full-size SCART connection but instead use some crappy converter into a smaller block on the back of the TV, usually designed in such a poor way that the weight of the SCART cable pulls it loose over time. This happened to my parents SCART connection and I ultimately ended up having to hold it together with a couple of rubber bands to keep it tight.
When you say there's a "shadow" is it like a ghost of the expected image, offset to the right?
Being a DVD player, I'd expect it to be capable of RGB output on SCART. Is there any chance this has been turned off somewhere in settings, which would then drop down to composite? (that alone wouldn't account for a "shadow" but it would be worse quality, for DVDs at least).
Got any other SCART cables lying around you can swap it with? Worth a quick try just to see if anything different happens.
When you say there's a "shadow" is it like a ghost of the expected image, offset to the right?
That appears to be what i'm seeing when there is no tape or DVD playing. I wasn't sure if it was fuzziness or ghosting. But the picture is also ghosting when playing back DVD's and VHS's
If I recall when we switched the VHS over to the new smart TV we did try another scart lead and the same effect happened on scart lead number two.
Wow - that's a horrible effect. That's not an analogue ghost or cable reflection - that would only really show itself horizontally.
Do the images jump between the two positions or are they continuously flickering between the two positions? Have you tried a different SCART cable - it could, just, be a dodgy sync connection (usually the syncs on RGB SCART connections are on the composite video signal)
Otherwise - what happens if you plug in a different SCART source into your TV? There is a possibility that the SCART input circuit has some how failed and it is failing to properly lock to the input signal?