Review Details

Super 8/8mm Film Scanner

Product Rating:

Product Review (submitted on February 10, 2022):

I have digitized over 35 small rolls and a couple of 7" reels of Super8 so far. More to do. Here is what I have learned:

The machine does a fine job but not without a little effort. It does not seem to like some splices, although splices with a good match of feed holes are OK. Pay attention and thread the films by the book. It is a little fussy about SD cards, I finally used a new high speed micro card in an adapter, formatting it every couple of rolls. I also connected a 27" TV for monitoring, this allowed me to see if there was any jitter and get an idea how the exposure was. A little hard to evaluate the exposure in black and white. If anything looked sketchy on the TV, I stopped after a few minutes and looked at the file on my computer. This was mostly unnecessary, but I was being cautious. I did have to go back and adjust exposure on a few rolls. Kodachrome aging seemed different than Ektachrome aging.

I cleaned all my film on my projector before converting, this mostly due to where the films were stored. I think I had to rerun 2 or maybe 3 rolls before I learned to format the SD card (this was a hint on Magnasonic's website). It also seems like sometimes it will stop at the end of a roll and sometimes not, but we got used to how long it took and didn't care.

When you start the machine, it advances a couple of frames and stops with the picture on the TV, this way you can see the exposure and focus. Nice feature once I learned not to leave the leader over the lens. If it was a choice, I would probably rate it at 4.5 just due to the SD card learning process, but I will give it a 5 because we liked the result and the extra effort learning how best to run it was minimal. It only jammed if the film had a real problem. If it does jam, it sits and digitizes the same frame over and over but does not hurt the film. Have to edit that out on the mp4 file.

It was really fun to look at 50 year old films on the computer, even though some have lost color; red does not age gracefully. No better or worse than the film although you can adjust the exposure. Some video editing programs will enhance the color and such. Our next adventure.

My son in law is waiting for his turn.