Digital Conversions LLC

The Kodak Disc Camera was a unique product when it was introduced in 1982. It was small, compact, easy to use, and had a built-in flash. To load it, you just dropped a black plastic film cartridge into the camera, closed it, and you were ready to shoot 15 photos.

Unfortunately, and of course completely unknown to those happy photographers at the time, the Disc Camera turned out to be sort of a time bomb – because the owners of those cameras now find themselves stranded on the wrong side of the Digital Divide (the GOOD NEWS: we have built the bridge that will take you across that Digital Divide!) - and, we just dropped the price (see below)!

By approaching the problem of digitizing Disc films from an engineering viewpoint, we have not only solved the problem of digitizing Disc films at very high resolution, but in the process, we developed proprietary equipment and methods that allow us to digitize ALL forms of photographic materials (slides, negatives & photos) with high resolution, and at competitive costs (https://digitalconversions.biz/index-fb.html).
While most other camera films can be digitized easily, because they are flat and fit into most scanners (which we now consider “old tech”), the films from the ill-fated Disc cameras cannot be scanned on conventional equipment – unless the film is mutilated.

You see, the very thing that made the camera unique ultimately became the problem – the films were round, and worse yet, had a thick plastic hub in the center of the circular film. It is this hub that causes most of the problem. It prevents the film from being mounted into a scanner that is designed to handle flat films, like slides and negatives. The only way to make the film flat is to cut out the hub, which in general is a very bad idea. Original photographic materials should never be altered in any way.

But – it gets worse! Even if they cut out the center hub, and put the film in a flat-film, scanner, the results are terrible. The images on a Disc Film measure just 10mm x 8mm, or, for more conventional units, 0.4 in x 0.31 in (roughly 3/8 in by 5/16 in). That means that if they use a 2000 DPI scanner, the resulting image will measure 785 pixels x 630 pixels. That is a ½ Megapixel image – worse than the first digital cameras (not to mention today's 24 MP cameras). If they go all the way to a 3000 DPI scanner, the image is then 1180 pixels x 944 pixels – barely over a 1 MP image (still terrible).

Fortunately for those former Disc Camera fans, Digital Conversions LLC (https://digitalconversions.biz/discfilma.html) has developed a process, using proprietary, custom built equipment, that allows us to capture digital images from Disc Films with astonishingly high resolution. We can produce single-frame images from from Disc Films that measure 4,700 pixels x 3,700 pixels – that is a 17 MP image! That's equivalent to a scanner operating at 12,000 DPI. It is actually a higher resolution than the film itself – a process known as “oversampling” - which insures that the resulting image contains the maximum amount of information available in the photographic image.

Perhaps just as important as the resolution of the digital images we produce from Disc Films is the editing process we go through to bring out the best possible image quality. We have processed over 2,000 Disc films in our 6+ years of operation. One of the things we have learned about Disc Films is that they tend to get cloudy over the decades since they were developed. We have refined our editing techniques to counteract that loss of image quality. We have also perfected many other image editing techniques to get the most from these images.

All of these advantages for Disc Film conversions are available for just $19.95/Disc (Price Break as of 9/2/2022!), including FULL editing of the images. For that price, we provide three sets of images (Digital Negative, Digital Positive, and Premier Edited versions – 45 total images/Disc). That way the Customer has the full set of images. Of course, if you prefer lower quality, you could always send your Discs to other companies (and pay as much as $45.00/Disc).

The photos with this Post show pairs of photos from Disc Films with the Digital Positive and Premier Edited versions side-by-side, so you can see the difference that our editing can make in the final images. For more information, just go to https://digitalconversions.biz/discfilma.html

The Kodak Disc Camera was a unique product when it was introduced in 1982. It was small, compact, easy to use, and had a built-in flash. To load it, you just dropped a black plastic film cartridge into the camera, closed it, and you were ready to shoot 15 photos.

Unfortunately, and of course completely unknown to those happy photographers at the time, the Disc Camera turned out to be sort of a time bomb – because the owners of those cameras now find themselves stranded on the wrong side of the Digital Divide (the GOOD NEWS: we have built the bridge that will take you across that Digital Divide!).

By approaching the problem of digitizing Disc films from an engineering viewpoint, we have not only solved the problem of digitizing Disc films at very high resolution, but in the process, we developed proprietary equipment and methods that allow us to digitize ALL forms of photographic materials (slides, negatives & photos) with high resolution, and at competitive costs (https://digitalconversions.biz/index-fb.html).

While most other camera films can be digitized easily, because they are flat and fit into most scanners (which we now consider “old tech”), the films from the ill-fated Disc cameras cannot be scanned on conventional equipment – unless the film is mutilated.

You see, the very thing that made the camera unique ultimately became the problem – the films were round, and worse yet, had a thick plastic hub in the center of the circular film. It is this hub that causes most of the problem. It prevents the film from being mounted into a scanner that is designed to handle flat films, like slides and negatives. The only way to make the film flat is to cut out the hub, which in general is a very bad idea. Original photographic materials should never be altered in any way.

But – it gets worse! Even if they cut out the center hub, and put the film in a flat-film, scanner, the results are terrible. The images on a Disc Film measure just 10mm x 8mm, or, for more conventional units, 0.4 in x 0.31 in (roughly 3/8 in by 5/16 in). That means that if they use a 2000 DPI scanner, the resulting image will measure 785 pixels x 630 pixels. That is a ½ Megapixel image – worse than the first digital cameras (not to mention today's 24 MP cameras). If they go all the way to a 3000 DPI scanner, the image is then 1180 pixels x 944 pixels – barely over a 1 MP image (still terrible).

Fortunately for those former Disc Camera fans, Digital Conversions LLC (https://digitalconversions.biz/discfilma.html) has developed a process, using proprietary, custom built equipment, that allows us to capture digital images from Disc Films with astonishingly high resolution. We can produce single-frame images from from Disc Films that measure 4,700 pixels x 3,700 pixels – that is a 17 MP image! That's equivalent to a scanner operating at 12,000 DPI. It is actually a higher resolution than the film itself – a process known as “oversampling” - which insures that the resulting image contains the maximum amount of information available in the photographic image.

Perhaps just as important as the resolution of the digital images we produce from Disc Films is the editing process we go through to bring out the best possible image quality. We have processed over 2,000 Disc films in our 6+ years of operation. One of the things we have learned about Disc Films is that they tend to get cloudy over the decades since they were developed. We have refined our editing techniques to counteract that loss of image quality. We have also perfected many other image editing techniques to get the most from these images.

All of these advantages for Disc Film conversions are available for just $21.50/Disc, including FULL editing of the images. For that price, we provide three sets of images (Digital Negative, Digital Positive, and Premier Edited versions – 45 total images/Disc). That way the Customer has the full set of images. Of course, if you prefer lower quality, you could always send your Discs to other companies (and pay as much as $45.00/Disc).

The photos with this Post show pairs of photos from Disc Films with the Digital Positive and Premier Edited versions side-by-side, so you can see the difference that our editing can make in the final images. For more information, just go to https://digitalconversions.biz/discfilma.html

The Kodak Disc Camera was a unique product when it was introduced in 1982. It was small, compact, easy to use, and had a built-in flash. To load it, you just dropped a black plastic film cartridge into the camera, closed it, and you were ready to shoot 15 photos.

Unfortunately, and of course completely unknown to those happy photographers at the time, the Disc Camera turned out to be sort of a time bomb – because the owners of those cameras now find themselves stranded on the wrong side of the Digital Divide (the good news: we have built the bridge that will take you across that Digital Divide!).

While most other camera films can be digitized easily, because they are flat and fit into most scanners, the films from the ill-fated Disc cameras cannot be scanned on conventional equipment – unless the film is mutilated.

You see, the very thing that made the camera unique ultimately became the problem – the films were round, and worse yet, had a thick plastic hub in the center of the circular film. It is this hub that causes most of the problem. It prevents the film from being mounted into a scanner that is designed to handle flat films, like slides and negatives. The only way to make the film flat is to cut out the hub, which in general is a very bad idea. Original photographic materials should *never* be altered in any way.

But – it gets worse! Even if they cut out the center hub, and put the film in a flat-film, scanner, the results are terrible. The images on a Disc Film measure just 10mm x 8mm, or, for more conventional units, 0.4 in x 0.31 in (roughly 3/8 in by 5/16 in). That means that if they use a 2000 DPI scanner, the resulting image will measure 785 pixels x 630 pixels. That is a ½ Megapixel image – worse than the first digital cameras (not to mention today's 24 MP cameras). If they go all the way to a 3000 DPI scanner, the image is then 1180 pixels x 944 pixels – barely over a 1 MP image (still terrible).

Fortunately for those former Disc Camera fans, Digital Conversions LLC (https://digitalconversions.biz/discfilma.html) has developed a process, using proprietary, custom built equipment, that allows us to capture digital images from Disc Films with astonishingly high resolution. We can produce single-frame images from from Disc Films that measure 4,700 pixels x 3,700 pixels – that is a 17 MP image! That's equivalent to a scanner operating at over 11,000 DPI. That is actually a higher resolution than the film itself – a process known as “oversampling” - which insures that the resulting image contains the maximum amount of information available in the photographic image.

Perhaps just as important as the resolution of the digital images we produce from Disc Films is the editing process we go through to bring out the best possible image quality. We have processed over *2,000* Disc films in our 6+ years of operation. One of the things we have learned about Disc Films is that they tend to get cloudy over the decades since they were developed. We have refined our editing techniques to counteract that loss of image clarity. We have also perfected many other image editing techniques to get the most from these tiny film images.

All of these advantages for Disc Film conversions are available for just $21.50/Disc, including full editing of the images. For that price, we provide three sets of images (Digital Negative, Digital Positive, and Premier Edited versions – 45 total images/Disc). That way the Customer has the full set of images. Of course, if you prefer lower quality, you could always send your Discs to other companies (and pay as much as $45.00/Disc).

The photos with this Post show pairs of photos from Disc Films with the Digital Positive and Premier Edited versions side-by-side, so you can see the difference that our editing can make in the final images. For more information, just go to https://digitalconversions.biz/discfilma.html

Starting Our Seventh Year!

The Digital Conversions LLC website went “live” in February, 2016. We are now in our seventh year of operation. Like many other businesses, it was slow going at first, but we have grown considerably over the last six years. Over that time, here's what we have done for our over 550 Customers:

Digitized: over 182,000 slides, 26,200 negatives, 2,000 Disc Films, 27,500 photos, 1,200 filmstrip frames, 2,000 APS film frames, 1,000 stereo slides, 1,200 album pages, isolated over 3,300 album photos, and restored 46 photos. We have also recovered previously unreadable files from 71 Mini-DVDs from digital cameras and digital video cameras; those files that were once "lost" can now be enjoyed by families once again.

We have created slide shows totaling over 8,100 images – more than 15 hours of total viewing time. We have also digitized 156 video tapes in eight different formats, and over 32,000 feet of 8mm and 16mm movie film.

We have printed more than 11,600 photos, and created more than 2,100 slide bundles with our exclusive Space-Saver(TM) (https://digitalconversions.biz/slides.html -saver) process – saving our Customers hundreds of cubic feet of storage space.

Our largest project to date arrived in three boxes, each measuring 2 feet x 2 feet x 2 feet – 24 cubic feet total volume. The boxes contained 59 Kodak carousels, each with a capacity of 140 slides. When completed, we had digitized 7,735 slides. The Space-Saver(TM) bundles were shipped out in three (much smaller) boxes with a total volume of less than 1.5 cubic feet – a reduction of 94% in the space needed to store that slide collection when compared with the 24 cubic feet it occupied when the slides were shipped to us.

Bottom line – we are “small” enough to provide our Customers with personalized “Boutique” service, but we are still able to handle large Orders from our Customers. We can, and often have, organized photo collections with customized directory structures to preserve important information.

We always preserve all the information that is present on carousel boxes or other containers, as well as anything found on index sheets that are sometimes included with carousels. Our obligation to our Customers is not just to convert their photographic items to digital files, but to act as their “Photo Archivist”, to preserve as completely as possible all the important information that their photographic collection contains. That way, these important, irreplaceable parts of their family history can be preserved, and enjoyed with the convenience of a digital archive.

Visit our website to learn more about our services. https://digitalconversions.biz/index-fb2.html

We've Moved!

After almost six years of operating in Glen Mills, PA Digital Conversions LLC has relocated to Middletown, Delaware, as my wife and I decided to “downsize” after living in the same house for 36 years.

Our new address is:

Digital Conversions LLC
364 East Main St., Suite 1489
Middletown, DE 19709

The actual move took place at the end of November. At that time, my business backlog had ballooned to over 30,000 items to be digitized. As a part of the move, I was not willing to take the risk of letting anyone else handle those Customer items, so we used a rented van and moved the entire mass of slides, photos, and negatives ourselves – they were never out of our personal control at any time.

Included in that batch was a single Order from one Customer that included 3 boxes measuring 2' x 2' x 2', containing in total 59 Kodak carousels, each holding 140 slides when full. The Customer requested the Space-SaverTM Option , of course. As a result, those three boxes (totaling 24 cu. ft. in volume) were reduced down to three boxes with a total volume of less than 1.5 cu. ft. - just 6% of the original volume of the slide collection. Now they need to figure out what to do with all that extra closet space!

Now that the busiest part of the move has passed and we are settled in, I have been able to reduce the backlog of Orders significantly, to a point where I am estimating that new Orders arriving now will be started within 6 – 10 weeks, instead of 12 – 16 weeks just a few months ago.

If you have some old photographic memories stored around your house, now would be a good time to have them digitized, to insure that they will not continue to deteriorate, and to insure that they can never be lost to any catastrophic incident. Digital Conversions LLC is able to digitize all forms, and all formats, of photographic materials – slides, negatives, prints, filmstrips, etc.

Check out our website and see what we can do for you. We offer “Boutique” personalized service, and can accommodate your special requests, but we also have the capability to handle large Orders, as described above. All at very competitive prices.

Slide/Photo Scanning Service