8mm & Super 8 Reels to Digital MovieMaker Film Scanner Converter, Pro Film Digitizer Machine with 2.4" LCD, Grey (Convert 3 inch and 5 inch Film reels into Digital) with 32 GB SD Card…

There are a whole lot of 8mm and super 8 home movies that are sitting on a shelf or in a basement, holding the memories of the past, unwatched, unseen for years and may be lost completely if they aren’t preserved.Most people no longer have projectors to play the films. Those that do have to find expensive replacement bulbs for them. Going outside to digitize them is a different sort of problem: it’s darned expensive. I’ve found costs as high as $15-18 for a single roll of 50 feet, depending on where you go. If you have a couple dozen reels or several larger reels (most people who have film do), there’s another much less expensive solution.The film to video recorder offers anyone the ability to digitize their own 8mm and super 8 home movie film cost effectively, if you are willing to invest a bit of time and effort.This machine is nearly identical to several models sold on the market. They all use the same internal workings, the same digital camera sensor, and the same plastic casing (in slightly different color variations). In fact, the only difference I found was the coloring and the lack of felt pads at the feed-in and feed-out of the film handling tray. I tested the units side-by-side.IN THE BOX: The transfer unit, one pickup reel, two film reel adaptors, power supply.USING THE SYSTEM: It’s easy. Thread the film through the machine using the visual instructions printed on the machine. Adjust for the film type – 8mm or Super 8. Determine the need for and make any adjustments to framing, sharpness, brightness. Start recording.Each 50-foot film length will take about 30 minutes, as it scans the film frame by frame and saves the combined images into a highly compressed MP4 file on the SD Secure Digital card. You can watch it on the small digital view on the machine or hook it up through a video cable to a TV.Keep in mind that the frames of 8mm and Super 8 movie film are very small. It was often shot under less than ideal lighting conditions – good quality film required a lot of light. So even under the best conditions, when everything was done right, capturing detail is challenging.As with most technology, understanding the limits and having realistic expectations is important.PERFORMANCE:While the unit is lightweight and compact, the resulting video is quite good. The Pro unit (I recommend it over the base unit) creates files that run at 18 frames per second, close to the original film speed of 16 frames per second for 8mm and right on target for 18 frames per second for Super 8 film.Digitizers of this type rely on the film sprockets (the tiny holes in the film) to move the film forward in an even, controlled fashion. So part of the unit’s performance is dependent on the condition of your film.Also, if your film is moldy or mildewy, decaying, buckled or otherwise damaged, the machine won’t be able to digitize the film well (i.e. the film will continually jam). If there are old or sloppy splices, the same is true: the film will jam. That’s not the machine’s fault, it’s your film’s fault.The resulting file is a highly compressed 1280 x 720 resolution MP4. Black and white film fares badly with a lot of visual artifacting. Well-exposed color film can look quite good, with closeups having more detail and sharpness.Adjustments to the sharpness can be hit or miss, depending on the film. It often creates additional artifacting. I run 95% of my film at the machine defaults. Focus seems good for the size of the image on the film.There are a number of recommendations I can personally give to squeeze out your best results.RECOMMENDATIONS IN USE:1) RUN YOUR FILM IN REWIND MODE FIRST to the pickup reel to clean the film and discover loose or bad splices and spots. Repair the splices. Then use the same function to rewind it onto the original reel. Then digitize the film.2) UPLOAD YOUR RESULTING MOVIE FILE TO YOUR YOUTUBE ACCOUNT. This single act improves your entire result. Not only can you share your videos easily, but the second compression that YouTube applies to the video actually makes the resulting movie look better and smoother in most cases (although you’ll lose a tad of sharpness in the process). YouTube will also let you edit the movie a bit, add some music for the background, and superimpose a watermark onto the video, creating a more engaging watching experience. It also serves as an archive for your precious memories. You can even restrict access to specific people, if you like, by making it private or unpublished.3) INVEST IN AN INEXPENSIVE VIDEO EDITING SOFTWARE PACKAGE. There are a number of packages priced under $99 (some at half that cost) that allow you to edit, alter and then burn the resulting files to DVDR for playing through a DVD player. But beware that they will often explode the file size once the video is loaded in. However, you can easily edit films together, remove parts you don’t want to see, adjust visuals, etc.4) BUY A SHEET OF SELF-STICK FELT FROM A CRAFT STORE. The felt at the beginning and the end of the carriage wears down over time. You can cut small pieces and replace the worn areas. This felt protects the film from scratching against the edge of plastic and removes some of the loose dust, dirt etc from the bottom side of the film as it enters the carriage. It can also be used under the metal tray guide if you find that the pickup reel pull is causing the film to “jump” when being scanned.EVALUATION: This is an excellent and cost-efficient way to archive and preserve all of your home movie films. If you or people you know have more than a handful of old 8mm and super 8 home movies, this machine will digitize your films and give you the ability to create files that play on your computer, videos that play on your DVD player, or both. This is an excellent and cost-efficient way to archive and preserve all of your home movie films. And this has a price tag less than other models. A great deal!

The mistake I made with this purchase was "assuming" that an image scanned by a 3.53 megapixel CMOS sensor and output to 1400x1080 MP4 video would faithfully reproduce the original image. What I failed to consider is that MP4 is actually a standardized container for video and audio files, but that what GOES INTO the MP4 is not necessarily of the quality one would expect based on the output format.When I looked at the first video produced I was appalled. Before jumping to any conclusions, I saved a frame from the video and examined in at various magnifications, and located the same image on the source film and examined it under a microscope (I'd include the microscope image but I don't have a way to digitize it). The original film frame is crisp, without any visible grain or other artifacts even at 300x, but the output image looks like a low-quality JPEG that's been re-compressed several times.To try to figure out where the artifacting came in, I saved a short video with no film in the scanner. This should produce a uniform white or whitish image, but in fact contains the same artifacting that I saw in the normal video. So evidently the actual images in the video are stored using a lossy compression format that is introducing artifacts. Unfortunately, it's so bad that there is virtually zero detail visible in the output video. Look at the attached image; it looks fine when it's viewed at the resolution of the digitizer's monitor (2.4"), but even at 50% zoom (8" on my monitor) you can see the speckling and loss of detail it causes. So as far as the quality of the video this produces, it is sorely wanting.As for the machine itself, the construction is of acceptable quality but nothing to write home about. Instead of decent keys it uses the cheapest clickable dots like those on inexpensive microwaves. The "focus" function has three settings: softer, normal, and harder. One adds blur to the image, while the other enhances the artifacts introduced during scanning. The "exposure" feature simply increases or decreases the backlight, so you can choose to wash out the image or have the whites turn to shades of grey. While mine did fairly well with standard 8mm film, the only way it would go more than a few frames with Super-8 was if I applied pressure to the front left corner of the film holder cover or pulled the source film down so that it moved upward into the scanner instead of straight across. In either case, it frequently misaligned frames or simply got stuck even though the film showed no evidence of damage to the drive holes.The best-case scenario using this digitizer would be to produce a video suitable for viewing on a smartphone or some other similarly sized device, and that's assuming that it made it through even a small film reel without choking. Otherwise, you'll need to use video editing software to fix the hiccups, but will never be able to get close to the resolution of the original movie.One more thing I should mention is that this particular machine seems to be being offered by several different sellers and even those offered by "eyesen" look like they're all the same but selling for different prices. Based on the quality of the manufacture and the video produced, I would think it should sell for about 1/3 of the $219 that I paid for it.

el producto no cumplio con mis espectativas. Es muy basico y poco flexible. La clidad el producto deja mucho que desear.

This unit does quite a good job of scanning every frame of the film, then converts it to video. I found that the resultant vide is a a bit bouncy (up and down). I fixed this by using Virtualdub32 with a Deshaker plugin. Then the video is very stable. I love this machine. Very much recommended.The Virtualdub32 program also has a frame rate adjuster from the 30FPS to 18 or 16FPS depending on the film type.