8mm and Super8 Digitizer
By Dale E. Lee
2024.04.02
Many people know that it is possible to digitize photos, but did you know that you can also digitize 8mm and Super 8 film?
You can, and I did, at least the Super 8 film. I was, and you may be, concerned about preserving these films, as by now they may be very old and brittle. Even though I tried to be very careful when threading the film into the digitizer and through no fault of the digitizer itself, I broke the film a couple of times in different places. I do not believe I was negligent, I was trying to be as careful as possible, but the film was about 45 years old and starting to crumble. I’m glad I didn’t wait longer, it would have been even more difficult to preserve it in the future.
Time affects different media differently. Where I was overall very pleased with the result of digitizing photo negatives, because of the brilliant colors a large portion of them resulted in, I was honestly fairly disappointed with the quality of the resulting Super 8 file. I cannot blame the digitizer for the result, it may have been the age of the film. But the result was much like watching an old black and white Charlie Chaplin film, just slightly colored.
Although I was not happy with the color, I am happy with the fact that I’ve been able to digitize it before it has been totally lost to time. I now have a very heartwarming film of my family when my first child was very young, something definitely worth the time to preserve.
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Seekerz, © 2024