This forum apparently has relatively few regular readers, but maybe this will help someone. Back in the early days of home VCRs, tapes were expensive, easily $6.00 or more each. And wages were then considerably less also. I recorded most of the time at EP/SLP for those reasons. I kept many of the tapes and now am transferring some of them to DVD to minimize storage space. It seems that tapes recorded at EP/SLP on the really old machines may not play well at all on some newer VCRs. The tape may appear to be bad when it is not. Terrible picture quality. I found an old discussion of this on a forum archive. I have 4 different brands of VCR here and simply using a different VCR usually solves the problem. Not convenient to switch hookups, but necessary. So don't give up on an old tape, try a different player. Apparently no problem with tapes home recorded at SP.