KODAKREELS 8mm & Super 8 Films Digitizer Converter with Big 5” Screen, Scanner Converts Film Frame by Frame to Digital MP4 Files for Viewing, Sharing & Saving on SD Card for 3” 4” 5” 7” and 9” Reels

This thing is awesome. A real work horse, and simple to use. I had originally bought the Wolverine version of this and just was not happy with it. The viewing screen was too small and angled down so I had to hunch over in my chair to see the image. You could not adjust the image position, focus, brightness, etc. in real time. The Kodak Reels has a large 5" screen that is easily viewable. You can adjust the image on the screen in real time. It does both 8mm and Super8. I have probably digitized 12 3-minute reels and 4 10-minute reels of 8mm and 7 3-minute reels of Super8. Just make sure the film is clean. Some of mine were dirty or moldy. I put the reels on Rewind and held a cleaning cloth (like for eyeglasses) on them while they passed thru. Once you have your image set, you can pretty much just let it run. It DOES take a LOOOOONG time, but that is the nature of digitizing. 8mm is like 15-20 frames per second, so a three minute film is at least 2700 images and it takes a picture of each image. A 3-minute film takes about 30 minutes to digitize. Kodak Reels is easy to operate, download to your computer. The menus are simple and easy to use. The buttons are kind of clunky, but not really an issue. Definitely recommend!

I've now run about 25 Super 8 films through this machine so I have a pretty good idea of what you can expect here. The bottom line is that this is a relatively cost-effective way to bring your old home movies into the digital age, assuming you have a substantial pile of them. But it is a fair bit of work, probably more than you expect it to be, for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of this machine.I have basically no complaints with the machine itself. It is reasonably straightforward to use and the results look pretty good to my eye. The image sensor seems to be good enough that you likely won't have to do this ever again in search of better results down the line, assuming you are dealing with home movies that were originally shot on a relatively simple and cheap machine in the first place. I wish it was a little bit easier to get the film seated into the scanner bed, but you eventually get the hang of it.Feeding the film into those guides around the scanning bed is really my only complaint with the design and operation of this machine. The interface is relatively simple and straightforward and it does everything you need it to do.However, when people talk about how great the good old days were, they probably were not talking about 8mm home movies. This stuff was revolutionary for its time, but it wasn't all that easy to work with even back then. Now that those rolls have been sitting in your closet for 50 years or so, they haven't gotten any easier to handle. They are now even more fragile, so they can break, they slip off the reel, they get stuck, and if you have any splices in them the splicing tape will likely not survive a trip through this or any other projector now.None of this is, in any way, the fault of this machine. Indeed, it seems to be calibrated to move slowly so to put as little strain on your now ancient, fragile film stock as possible. But it means that running a large library of home movies through it is going to be a somewhat lengthy and occasionally fussy process. You'll be getting out the scotch tape to do some half-baked repair to get your film through the machine or end up with a tangled mess if you don't carefully babysit it as it slowly grinds through each of the reels in your library.I never timed it to see how long it took to process a roll of film, but I'd guess it runs at about 1/10th speed. So figure roughly 30 minutes of processing time for 3 minutes of film. You don't have to watch it constantly the entire time it is running, but you do need to be in the room and keep an eye on it as it works, in case there is a splice that fails, it gets stuck, etc.If you are looking at this machine it is probably because you looked at the prices of those scanning services you can ship your film off to and were shocked by how much they charged. I suspect a lot of that cost is the inherent hand labor of what is required to handle this old film stock. So this DIY choice will save you some cash, but you are going to be providing all of that same labor yourself.I bought this as a Christmas present to surprise my now elderly parents with a chance to see these movies from their youth that have been gathering dust in a closet for decades now. If you are planning something similar, all I can recommend is that you give yourself a considerable amount of lead time to get the scanning work done, because the number of hours you will invest in scanning that box of old home movies, getting it edited into a presentable format, etc. is probably a lot more than you expect it will take going in.

I priced out having a photo service transfer all of my parents 8mm videos to digital. Since we had a large quantity of these to do, it was more cost effective to purchase this Kodak unit and make the digital copies myself rather than having the local photoshop do the conversion. I am on about my 25th film reel and have had no issues with the unit. It occassionally will make some noise (from what I believe is the take up real drive system) but then it goes away. When I was looking to purchase I read some of the negative reviews. Everything that was negative seemed to be user error. You have to make sure that the film is properly seated under the four guide clips. If the film is chewed up you will have to baby sit the process but this is not the fault of the machine. Also, the machine can't make the move quality any better so don't expect it to look like your high def TV when you are streaming a movie. It is what it is and does a great job saving family movies and coverting them to an MP4 files. Files are easily transfered using an SD card. Functions are very intuitive and easy to use. It would be nice if they had a touch screen, but the buttons work fine.