Great, low cost converter for slides and negatives.
I had been thinking about getting something to convert all the slides/negatives/etc that my parents/grandparents had for years, but kept putting it off. A few weeks ago, my sister mentioned that our 94yo grandmother had expressed interest in looking at old slides and reels she had, but we couldn't find the projectors. I thought that this would be a good time to just look for something that could not only project them in some way, but also convert them to digital (basically two birds, one stone). I searched around and found this converter. I liked this model because it did so many different types of formats, had a HDMI output, and wasn't crazy expensive. The HDMI output came in handy because we could actually show them on the 60" tv so that multiple people could see them and we could convert them at the same time. It was the first time my sister and I had ever done anything with slides; I didn't even know there were that many different formats until I started doing research on the converter. It took a little bit of time initially to figure what type of slides we had and which of the inserts needed to be used, but once we figured it out and got into a groove, it worked really well. Once you have it set up right and the procedure down, it’s just push a slide through, line it up, push a button to convert/save, and go to the next slide.
All the slides we used were in the round carousels, so we found that it worked the best as a two person job. One person actually did the slide converting, while the other person got the next set ready and put the converted ones back in the carousel. If we had been strictly doing them for speed, we probably could have done several hundred in an hour. The ability to rotate the picture while you were viewing was especially nice with some of the slides taken in landscape and others portrait. However, while not a huge thing, I wish you could flip the picture to a mirror image as well. Many of the slides weren't labeled so if you put them in upside down, you could orient the picture correctly up and down, but it was still reversed. Technically, you could take the slide out, but you need to feed several through the guides on the tray in order to push the last one out, so you would to keep putting slides in and keep track of which one you needed to flip so you could put it back through. It was especially difficult if you happened to have some on the tray that were correct and others that were flipped. Again, not a deal breaker, and we do want to go through and try to label them on a pc, so they can be reversed then, but it’s just something that could have come in handy as an option.
I somewhat question the idea of using this to do 8mm/super 8 film. There’s a video on the website that talks about how to do it, but it’s a bit dubious to me. They say to feed the film into the tray and take a picture every 16-20 frames (that’s roughly the frame rate of 8mm/super 8, so it’s basically one picture per second.) Then you have to take the pictures and use another program to compile them into a video. First, doing this makes the video fairly choppy since you’re reducing the fps down to basically 1 frame per second. Second, to convert an hour of film, that would be 3600 manual pictures. We have several boxes full of reels, so it could easily take 10,000+ pictures to convert them. I think for now, we’re going to focus on all the slides and negatives, and then look at possibly getting the 8/super 8 converter with the reels. Read full review
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