Review Details

Super 8/8mm Film Scanner

Product Rating:

Product Review (submitted on December 23, 2020):

After reading all the reviews that appeared pretty good i decided to buy this scanner. I have 4000 feet of super 8 film that I want to convert. first I'll give my impression of the features; its advertised to allow several adjustments for exposure,brightness & frame alignment which is true but you can't make these adjustments before you start scanning, you have to do a trial run, remove the sd card, play it back on pc or whatever and the make an adjustment, scan again and play back to see if your okay, so there's a number of steps involved there. The instructions are okay but could be more specific, took me several try's at pushing buttons before I figured out what they were saying, to make matters worse, the buttons had to be pushed several times in order to change to the next step, like something wasn't making contact in the button switch., you push the button and nothing happens. My first run with a 50 foot reel went okay but when I went to a 400 foot reel the problems started. first the take up reel would stop while the ratcheting mechanism that moves the film across the window kept going so I had film laying all over the floor after I left for a few minutes. Next the ratcheting mechanism stopped along with the take up reel; I shut the thing off, restarted, it ran a few minutes and same thing happened, this scenario repeated several times and I gave up. I'm sending it back , it takes about 4 hours to do a 7" reel and you really can't walk away from this thing, others have said the same. Also, my film is perfectly clean and the transfer slots are like new but when I inspected the film that had gone through the machine after problems started I can see scraping marks along the upper edges of the slots, upon inspecting I see a presser plate that presses down on the top of the film to keep it engaged with the ratcheting gear and the edges of that plate very rough in my opinion; not good to have a rough metal edge pushing on your film like that if you intend to keep the film. Maybe I got the exception, but my film is very important to me, I expect good results without damaging my film, I want something that's dependable and also I wasted a whole day trying to make this thing work. the bigger problem is these scanners all look identical if you examine them closely so its possible your getting the same one with a different name, no-matter who you buy from.