They make a digitizing kit (off Fry's, E-bay or Amazon) that hooks to your VCR and plays back via a converter box to your computer, where you store the analog VHS signal to digital.  you can then burn - write the data to a DVD drive off your computer.

Something like...

https://www.amazon.com/Lvozize-Digital-Converter-Capture-Transfer

I know you don't want a combo machine but the last I saw them at walmart they were about $45 or so. If you have to buy anything else I'd just go this route and save yourself some potential aggravation getting everything to work together.

YMMV

The Tape is what it is.

You can play it back with whatever VCR you have or want to use.  Coverting the tape to computer doesn't erase or harm the tape at all.

The advantage of putting it to your Computer are:

(A) You can make multiple copies of the video off one pass of the tape.  You can upload it to You Tube or drop box to share, off site storage in case of fire, flood or theft, and it is easy to burn mulitple DVDs off the computer master, than running the tape each time (risking degrade or damage) to make each direct to DVD copy off a single machine.

(B) You can edit the tape before going to DVD (chapters, commentary, audio, ect...)

Have you watched the VHS quality video on your HD TV?  The quality is pretty bad, even if your receiver does scaling.

I have the DVD/VHS recorder and can convert VHS to DVD as long as there is no copy protection on the tape. I copied all my 'back in the day' tapes to DVD and have done several friend's too.

You’re looking to convert videos from one obsolete format to another, why?

I can give you a long list of vhs films that never made it to dvd or digital.  Not to mention one of a kind personal videos and one of a kind training films.