It should be nearly impossible to affect the quality of captured footage in any way, unless you do transfers via RCA instead of Firewire. There could be some third party apps that compress/convert the footage but Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro don't do that. They also recognise the correct specs automatically even if you accidentally choose DV PAL instead of NTSC in the capture settings.
Both of the examples in this case are NTSC footage but the format difference between PAL (720 x 576) and NTSC (720 x 480) might also cause some confusion as far as variety in exported image quality goes.
Like Bataaard said, it's most likely due to faulty VAP units. There's a possibility that the filmer has chosen to turn the sharpness setting down but that's unlikely, too.