I'm not sure what you qualify as being medium priced, but... the best results I have seen is by using the JVC D-VHS decks. MSRP is somewhere around $1000, but actual street price is much lower.

480i or upconverted 1080i component video seems to be a big factor in evaluating overal video quality. The picture seems to a step above what I have seen from other decks and the sync is clean and strong.

If that deck is out of the price range, then I would recommend one of the other SVHS decks from JVC. Most, if not all of their models have a defeatable vertical sync regenerator. As sync from a VCR is read from the tape, it is nice to be able to strip and overlay clean NTSC sync for poor tapes.