Is there any reason why you need to use your camera as the playback machine? Is it a non-VHS format?
If it is VHS and it's a standard mini VHS tape, you can get an adaptor that allows you to play back via a normal VCR. That might be preferable to using an old camera. Old cameras, unless they've been properly serviced and maintained can do nasty things to your valuable tapes.
There are products out there that suck in analogue video and spit out digital, but, if you have a new digital video camera and it has DVin/out as well as analogue in/out they are genrally capable of being used as the converter. That way you can either dump straight to digital cassette or route the video through the camera directly onto your HDD in the PC.
Remember though, that even digital cassettes can suffer from drop out and give some nasty pixellation effects as a result, so your best bet is to try and dump straight to hard disk. Once there, it's possibly safer than being held on removable magnetic media and you can dump to CD or DVD. Bank on needing about 12GB of HDD space per hour's worth of digitised video.
Hope that helps
ST