Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This unit has worked really well for me so far. My father-in-law asked me to get a bunch of his father's old 8mm films digitized. After realizing how much it would cost to send them out to have it done professionally, I decided to try doing it myself. I started out by attempting to use his old projector to play the film while having a digital camera pointed at the screen to record it. That wasn't working so well, and I quickly realized it wasn't worth the frustration. I noticed this product a few months ago, but the fact that it only holds reels that are 5" or less scared me off from it. Half of the reels I had to convert were larger than this. But more recent reviewers commented that they figured out ways to make it work with larger reels, so I thought I'd give it a shot. Since other reviewers have covered some of the things you have to deal with, like the fast recorded frame rate (I use the free software VLC afterwards to slow the video files down from 30fps to 18), I figure I'll share how I've been using it to digitize the 6" and 7" reels. The photo I'm posting will show it better than I can describe, but I simply set up the old projector to the right of the unit, facing towards it. The film to be recorded goes on the upper arm of the projector, and a large empty take-up reel goes on the lower arm (just as if you were going to play the film with the projector itself). I place the empty 5" reel that comes with the unit on its left side and leave the right side empty. I then feed the film over top the digitizer, around the empty 5" reel, and into the digitizer. As the film leaves the digitizer, it gets picked up by the take-up reel on the projector. I simply run the projector (without the light turned on) at the same time as the digitizer. Works like a charm, even though it takes a good 4 hours to get through one reel. I know this requires having the right equipment, but hopefully it helps someone else trying to figure out what they can do. A couple of other notes: A pretty recent firmware update added the capability to adjust the frame that you record, which is pretty nice. You can move it left/right and up/down as well as zoom in/out. The initial settings actually worked pretty well for me, but at some point, I started playing around with it without first writing down the initial settings in case I needed to go back to them. There is a menu option to reset the unit to default settings, so I assumed I could just use that if needed. Well, it turns out that the default reset only works for options like exposure, not for the frame adjustments. I called technical assistance to ask what the initial settings were, but the guy just laughed at me repeatedly and said they didn't know. I guess it was funny that I assumed the default settings option would include frame adjustment settings. I didn't mind that they didn't have (or know) default settings, but the laughter was just an odd response to a customer. Anyway, the adjustments are easy enough to figure out and are a very useful option, but just know that there aren't defaults. Overall, though, this thing has been a great. With the number of films I needed to convert (I'm on my 48th reel right now), it was never going to get done without it. And my FIL recently let me know that he is planning on bringing over some Super8 reels that he took when my wife was little, so I have that to look forward to as well. I assume I will be just as satisfied with how this machine handles those films, but if not, I will come back and add to this review.