For many of us, our photos and videotapes are our most precious possessions, but time and technology march on and closets fill with old photos and outdated media. Remember Betamax tapes, Super 8 movies, and Instamatic slides? Photographic prints have a limited life; they deteriorate over time. Slides fade. Negatives become brittle and are subject to scratching. Videotapes have a shelf life, and they are dependent on the availability of a working playback device. A closetful of old Betamax tapes is useless if all you have is a modern VHS player. Super 8 and other film-based movie systems require the appropriate projector and a screen.
Today, the headlong rush is into digital media. Digital cameras outsell film cameras, and nearly all of us have become used to looking at images on computers (from our own collection or downloaded from the Internet) or on television using CDs or DVDs as the source. A single DVD can hold hundreds of high-resolution photos or several hours of video. DVDs are easier to store and handle and offer a much longer life expectancy. In addition, images stored in digital format have another very important advantage over older analog media (including photos, slides, film, and negatives): Pictures can be copied and moved an endless number of times without degrading the quality.
The job of the film-to-digital-scanning professional is to gather the technology and the expertise to convert media from analog to digital. Besides that, this job also enhances the quality of and removes flaws from old negatives or videotapes, and transfers videotape to CD or DVD for display on computers and televisions.