Kodak REELS Film Digitizer for 8mm and Super 8 Film

Not in the Box

• Essential Memory Cards (Not Included)

Using the Kodak Reels Film Digitizer

I have been using the Kodak Reels film digitizer extensively now for about three weeks. I have been working with my father's old 8mm and super 8mm films, some which go back to the 1930's. It's a true tressure finding mission to be able to recover and look at these old films. The digitizer works well, the sensor in Kodak's Reels, is I believe the best on the market for use by non-professionals. But unfortunately some of my older 8mm films have deteriorated badly, especially ones filmed prior to around 1974. But at the same time, I have successfully digitized 8mm films from the 1930's which somehow have remained in tack. And when you have good film to work with, the results are excellent. The key I think is proper storage of the film, meaning don't store your old films in basements or other humid places. Jaming of the film as it goes through the digitizer is not uncommon, especially with older warped film or film that has been poorly spliced togther. I expect this will be a problem with any of the other digitizers on th emarket. They all seem to have similar ways of feeding the film into the machine. There are a number of easy enough work arounds when this happens. I might also add that the process is time consuming. A three minute film might take 20 or so minutes to go through the digitization process. Also, like all the less expensive digitizer they do not record sound. All and all, I'm pleased with my machine but only wish I had started this project twenty or thirty years ago!

Great quality scans

BLUF: This is a great digitizer and I recommend it, with some caveats. Some of the other reviews talked about needing to babysit the digitizer and I totally agree. In my case, the older metal reels (5 and 7) don't fit tightly on the shaft and tend to wobble, eventually falling off if I don't pay attention, even with the provided adaptor. Also, the film sometimes comes off the spools for reasons I haven't been able to figure out. Because the digitizer scans frame-by-frame, it is a time-consuming process. Having to babysit the digitizer means you can't really multi-task. Lastly, the directions aren't great and I resorted to watching a YouTube video to fully understand how the digitizer was supposed to operate once I took it out of the box. That said, I am REALLY impressed with the quality of the scans. I have a box of 40 to 50-year-old Super 8 reels and to have them scanned at a local lab would be crazy expensive (at $0.39/foot). Even though this project is taking longer than expected, it has been fun to get these precious memories in a more sharable format.

Compressed Video Looks Awful

Going into buying this unit I wasn't expecting preservation quality but I certainly wasn't expecting the final video quality to be nearly as bad as it is. Upon doing an initial scan of an 8mm reel, with the sharpening setting set to the default of 0, the digital artifacting was so bad that the video was unwatchable. Stepped down the sharpness to -2, the lowest it could go, and all we got was a blurry image that still had digital artifacts. Not sure why Kodak went with MPEG-4 compression instead of a more modern codec like H264, which would have been many times better in quality. The machine only starts with an 8 megapixel camera, so compressing that to MPEG-4 was not a good idea. The results are much worse than should be expected. I could have overlooked the cheap build quality of this unit, especially those very click-y plastic buttons, if the unit actually produced decent looking results, but the footage in my opinion is unusable. I've avoided the Wolverine film scanner because it seemed cheap all the way around. This unit was said to have twice the quality of the Wolverine and I assumed Kodak slapping their name on this was a sign of some sort of quality, I was wrong. It seems you really have only two very different options here: get a super cheap scanner like this one, or spend thousands on a high end film scanner. A solid middle ground option would be nice for the semiprofessional working their way to higher end gear. Kodak missed the mark with this one. Super disappointing.

No reverse

Seems to be all plastic...a little cheaply made. If you have to back up a little there is no reverse at all...you have to literally take both reels off and rewind (or fast forward-which is essentially the same; fast forward or reverse). At $299 this would be a better price point for this device...but $399 is a bit pricey.