Comment by mapontosevenths

Of course tape isn't the best, but you can actually squeeze more out of tape than you might expect.

One of my latest nerd rabbit holes has been using the Domesday Duplicator, and now the MISRC, to extract higher quality video from old VHS, VHS-C, and 8mm video. Thanks to the vhsdecode project you can now bypass most of the original hardware and use software to reconstruct the video from the raw RF. It's expensive, computationally, but with a proper RF extraction you can now capture better video than the the original hardware ever could.

I haven't tried it yet, but I hear that with dirty tricks like "stacking" multiple passes, or even captures from multiple tapes, you can further enhance it.