The heads of your VCR will read the signal magnetically encoded on the tape, and will translate this in...oh, you mean the quality
Considering how bad they look on my 27", I'd say pretty horrible
Jeff Kleist
In other words, there is no signal interpretation, like with DVD; so, I have no real advantage over a regular 4x3 TV? The only benefit will be that the tape has the "full picture image", as opposed to "pan and scan"?
I was under the impression that there was also a variety of zoom modes available of which at least one stretches the picture horizontally and vertically, filling the screen (you'd still get the black bars for aspect ratios wider than 1.78:1 of course but they'll be smaller) and keeping the geometry intact. With all that said, the quality of the image will appear to be horrendous, just like the previous posters stated.
Dmitry is correct- you can use the zoom mode, so that the geometry is correct.
As far as the "interpretation" that you speak of, I assume you are talking about DVDs that are encoded for display on 16x9 TVs. Widescreen VHS tapes have no such encoding, so they are displayed just as a non-anamorphic DVD would be. However, with the reduced horizontal resolution of VHS, they generally look, uh, not too good.
I have made a 16x9 encoded SVHS tape from a DVD or two, as an experiment, and it looks OK- still not nearly as good as the anamorphic original.
Todd