I received an email from a reader a month or two back saying they were having trouble with the time-base correction (TBC) functionality on the Snell and Wilcox TBS-185. Thinking back to my review, I actually always tested with Laserdiscs, and generally played through players with integrated digital TBCs. I didn’t think much of this at the time – after all a TBC should, you know, correct timebase errors.

The reader was having issues with PAL Laserdiscs and VHS tapes, and wondered if I’d tested with them… well – I hadn’t.

As it turns out – the ‘C’ (Golden Gate) input of the TBS-185 is sensitive to time base error. The uncorrected feed from a VHS tape is pretty twitchy. Even fed from the basic digital TBC of a Panasonic NV-200 – it’s still twitchy.

‘Warriors of the Wind’ VHS captured via a Panasonic NV-200 (tbc-off). A very unstable image.

During my earlier review I noted that the DPS-575 it had either a 3D comb-filter, or a TBC + 2D comb filter. That design choice seemed odd at the time, but was presumably the product of either limited RAM or limited processing power. Unfortunately seems like the TBS-185 has the same issue, it just doesn’t advertise it clearly. Very disappointing.

Buyer beware.

‘Warriors of the Wind’ VHS captured via a Panasonic NV-200 (tbc-on). Slightly better – but still some intermittant ‘flagging’ issues.