Like me, you may well have cupboards groaning under the weight of your old camcorder and VHS tapes. You might well have DVDs and Blu-rays that occupy metres of shelf space, and you may well be feeling that it’s high time they were all neatly compacted. There’s no time like the present. While you still have the ability and the hardware to replay those Mini DV, VHSc, S-VHS tapes and silver discs, it’s time to bring them all together into digital HDMI.
Once you’ve converted your assorted mountain of tapes you can take a couple of Brave pills and clear out your drawers, drawers that are bursting with old camcorders, chargers, instruction books, spare batteries and the like. Your lumpy VHS (or V2000 or Betamax) recorder can be jettisoned, because all this ancient kit hasn’t got much life left in it now, has it?
The Tendak Video Converter
The Tendak black box weighs in at 173 gm, encased as it is by black aluminium alloy. You may find that your VCR, portable DVD player or camcorder only has composite (yellow for video, red and white for audio) outputs, and this is where the £30 Tendak converter box comes in. Even better if your player has S-Video out though, as this transfers a higher quality video signal. You plug in the Tendak’s power cable, connect your device using the front sockets, and the box will digitise (convert) the signal and send it forth through the HDMI socket. You can then view all your old tapes and DVDs on your modern TV, which these days will generally only accept HDMI or USB signals.
Round the back of the Tendak box it gets more interesting. There’s the 5v power in socket followed by the operating LED. Next there’s a tiny button that toggles the innards to accept either the composite or the S-video input signal. Next, another toggle takes you sequentially through the HDMI’s output options, and you can choose to output at 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i and 1080p. I can’t really see the point in outputting at less than the Full Monty resolution of 1920 x 1080 30p, as they all encode at 16 mbps and some of the settings default to a very jerky and unusable 15 fps. The 1280 x 720p outputs 60 fps video, but this isn’t going to make your original 25 fps footage look any smoother. As it’s a toggle switch, all the output settings are shown briefly on a connected monitor by the way. Next there’s an audio out socket, followed by the HDMI socket – which is video and audio together of course.
My photo shows a set-up whereby I can play VHS or S-VHS tapes, full size or camcorder variety. I can also play MiniDV or HDV tapes, and while any of these are playing I can check to see all’s well on the connected 7’’ Feelworld monitor. Neither the camcorder nor the VHS deck has HDMI out, so their signals are sent through the Tendak, which upscales them to 1920 x 1080 and sends them via the supplied 17” long HDMI cable.
Performance on test
The Tendak video converter isn’t perfect, bit it’ll take in anything analogue and convert it to digital, though some of the settings stretch 4:3 out to 16:9. Sometimes video footage has very small blocks (like cine frames) running up the right hand side of the image, and some settings shift the image slightly over to the right, leaving a thin black bar down the left hand side. These small faults are easily corrected in an editing package should you feel the need to. If you don’t feel the need to, we can’t be friends.
My Tendak is converting old camcorder tapes even as I write this, saving my memories for another day.
Tom
Frequently bought together
This item: Tendak S-video to HDMI Converter, S-video RCA AV CVBS Composite to HDMI Converter Upscaler Adapter N64 SNES to HDMI Adaptor Support PS2, Blu-ray Player, Nintendo 64, SNES, Sega Genesis and More
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This item  Tendak S-video to HDMI Converter, S-video RCA AV CVBS Composite to HDMI Converter Upscaler Adapter N64 SNES to HDMI Adaptor Support PS2, Blu-ray Player, Nintendo 64, SNES, Sega Genesis and More | Recommendations  |  |  |  |  | |
| Price | £33.81 | £27.66 | £83.16 | -20%£11.46 Was: £14.34 | £21.50 | £24.56 |
| Delivery | Get it as soon as Thursday, Jan 30 | Get it as soon as Thursday, Jan 30 | Get it as soon as Thursday, Jan 30 | Get it as soon as Thursday, Jan 30 | Get it as soon as Thursday, Jan 30 | Get it as soon as Thursday, Jan 30 |
| Customer Ratings | ||||||
| Sold by | DAVIKO | HIPRORCA | DirectfromStarTech | Uhddadi-UK | WPMY-EU | WPMY-EU |
| connector type | HDMI | RCA/Scart/HDMI | HDMI | RCA, HDMI | HDMI | usb, HDMI |
| number of ports | 6 | 3 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| current rating | 5 amps | 1 amps | 0.8 amps | — | 0.01 amps | — |
| input voltage | 120 volts of alternating current | 5 volts | 5 volts | 5 volts | 5 volts | — |
| power plug type | type g 3pin uk | no plug | no plug | no plug | no plug | no plug |
