Review of Video Conversion Experts

If you want to drive yourself crazy, try this exercise. Go through your closets and desk drawers. All of them. Yes, the basement too. Pull out all the video footage you have, whether it's in reels or cassettes or laserdiscs. Now calculate how much you spent on all that equipment and film. Do you still have the right hardware to play that old footage of Junior's first steps? I didn't think so.

Luckily there are plenty of film transfer companies out there to transfer your old Super 8, 16mm, and 8mm to DVD.

Video Conversion Experts is one such company, based in Arizona. The site stands out in a few areas. First of all, you can get an online quote, and they have clear step-by-step instructions for how to send in your video. They routinely restore your video when they transfer it to DVD, and their end results are high-resolution enough so they don't look crappy on high-definition TVs. Want to make sure they're legit? They're certified by the Better Business Bureau.

And how good are their prices? A little searching reveals that they're not the cheapest out there, but their service seems to be more comprehensive than other companies. You can get your old film converted to DVD somewhere else for less money, but most companies don't include restoration work in their basic package. Also, since you pay them based on the number of hours of video they're converting, you don't have to pay a high flat fee just to convert 15 minutes of footage. Their turnaround time seems remarkably quick to me as well, at 12-14 days.

As a library geek who hangs out with archivists, I'd like to see some discussion of how customers can care for their DVDs so they'll last as long as possible, and maybe a discussion of the fact that today's DVD technology will probably be obsolete eventually. Just look at the floppy disk--once a standard format, now a specialty item that many people don't have the technology to read. But this is something I'd like to see addressed by the industry as a whole, and I would have been pleasantly surprised if I'd found this kind of content in the site's articles.

Overall I find the site helpful and easy to use. The next time I'm at a family gathering with my spouse, I'm going to gently remind my father-in-law that he was thinking of having the family videos digitized. I think he could do a whole lot worse than this company to transfer his old Super 8 film to DVD.