So my £29.99 LG, special offer from Comet in Bradford, doesn't cut the mustard then?

I didn't know that you could get RGB output on a VHS recorder, surely, again, you can't put back what wasn't there. I know that there are/were S-VHS machines, but you have to record in S-VHS to get the benefit on playback.

What puzzles me is those, mainly "Readers Offers", of turn your LP's/Cassettes/Video tapes in to CD's/DVD's. Turntables and decks at vastly inflated prices with USB outputs: Surely if you have any of those formats, you have the machine to put them on
- if not, surely you can borrow one of a friend or relative for the one off exercise of transferring your stuff over? - whatever, you can feed them in to the line in sockets or an appropriate video input at a fraction of the cost.

If you wanted to transfer your prerecorded VHS tapes, you would probably still come up against the Macrovision copy protection: As far as I'm aware overcoming it isn't a software issue.

The only problem I had with transferring wedding videos, using a PC, is that one was a wedding in China: When they say Red China, it has nothing to do with communism, everything in the Country seems to be red - from the decorations on the wedding cars, signeage to uniforms - with the potential to flare on the video.

Stop me if I'm wrong, I speak with a certain authority as my great uncle was our ambassador in Shanghai many years ago, but I'm told that China never had VHS tapes/recorders - by the time outside influences became acceptable, the world had moved on to the DVD.

What I haven't been able to do successfully is transfer slides/negatives to jpg's: I bought a PrimeFilm gizmo some years back, but it was never satisfactory, I think you've got to spend a great deal of money to do it well. I wish they had had digital cameras when I was in to photography, I have mountains of prints, negs and slides going back to my mum's slides of our childhood: To put them all out to a professional service would be prohibitive.