Review Details

Super 8/8mm Film Scanner

Product Rating:

Product Review (submitted on December 31, 2020):

I purchased this film scanner to transfer old family movies into digital format. I have reels of Super 8mm on both the 5" and 7" sizes. After a few stumbling points getting started, this machine has worked well, doing the job easily and giving me files that I can readily edit. The stumbling points for me were: 1) As noted (though I had missed this in the description), the machine does not come with the required SD card. 2) What is not noted in the printed manual that comes with the machine, but I found digging through the Magnasonic website, is that you cannot use an SD card larger than 32 gigabytes. When I tried using a 64 gig card, my files wouldn't save properly.Once I got the SD card situation sorted out, the machine worked really well. I would set it up with a reel to digitize, stay with it for a minute or two to make sure everything was running smoothly, and then walk away for several hours while it did its thing. Sometimes the machine would release the end of the film completely when the reel was up and then turn itself off. Other times the last part of the reel would remain in the image scanner section of the machine, and it would just keep running, leaving me with long sections of the digital version at the end that were just the same frame or a blank, but this can easily be trimmed off.Overall, this is, in my mind, worth the purchase for the memories I have been able to digitize and share with my family. Given how expensive it is to send film out to get digitized, this purchase has ended up making a lot of sense for me, even with the additional cost of the SD card and the external hard drive I purchased to manage the large files that were eating up all my storage space on my computer.