Many years ago, I used a commercial service to digitize some of my parents' old family slides and photos. The quality was not as satisfying as I would have liked. For instance, photos that were meant to be low-light came back auto-exposed to be brighter. It was disappointing to see artful sunset scenes brightened up to look like it was midday, washing out all the sunset colors.

So when my father's health was failing in 2008, I skipped the commercial services and urgently began digitizing all my parents' slides and photos myself, using an Epson Precision flatbed scanner with transparency attachment. The process was excruciatingly time-consuming, but I justified the time because if I didn't do it, the photos -- including a number of inherited photos from as far back as 1903 -- could be lost to history.

After retiring in 2015, I decided it was time to tackle the monumental task of digitizing my own personal media collections -- slides, photos, videotapes, audio LP and tape collections.

I began with my slides and photos, many of which I could scan at higher quality directly from the negatives instead of prints. Again, the Epson Perfection scanner worked beautifully, but the project (some 3000 photos) took the better part of a year, working off and on.

While working on the slides and photos, I came across an article (in 2016) that the last company in the world making VHS players was ceasing production. That scared me because I had a lot of family videos from the early 1980's that were recorded onto full-size VHS tapes. (That was before the Sony HandiCam was invented.) So I promptly set about digitizing my VHS home videos, using an analog-to-digital converter that plugged into a firewire add-in card in my computer.

Next, I tackled all my Video-8, Hi-8, and Digital-8 camcorder tapes. I had a Digital-8 camcorder, which was backward-compatible with the earlier formats, and playback could be output via firewire. That meant I could use the camcorder to digitize the analog Video-8 and Hi-8 tapes, as well, without having to invest in another A-to-D converter.

Next were my mini-DV tapes. The process to convert those was basically the same as the 8mm videotapes -- playing the tapes in the camcorder directly into my computer via firewire.

All together, I converted about 300 videotapes.

(Incidentally, both my VHS player and my mini-DV camcorder have died in the last few years, so if you have similar tape conversions to do, I urge you to get them done ASAP before your equipment no longer works!)

After digitizing all my videotapes, I moved on to digitizing my vinyl LP collection (about 300 records). I considered buying a new turntable with USB output, but it was hard to justify the price for what would be a one-time project when I already had a good, audiophile quality turntable and sound system that still worked.

Instead, I opted for a Behringer UFO202 converter, and it's exceeded all my expectations. I highly recommend it! It's specs are good (freq response 10-20k, THD 0.05%, S/N -89 dbA), and it sits inline between your turntable and your stereo preamp.

If you already have a good quality turntable, this is an excellent option -- and not to mention, a whole lot less expensive, too.

Unplug your turntable from the phono inputs of your preamp and plug it into the Behringer, and plug the Behringer into the line/tape/aux inputs on your preamp. (The Behringer has its own phono amplifier, so you must bypass the phono stage in your preamp.) The USB plug on the Behringer plugs into your laptop or desktop computer, and it couldn't be simpler.

The UFO202 basically acts like a "tap" to fork the turntable output to your computer, where it can be captured and edited with a sound editor like Audacity. I used that to digitize my collection of about 340 vinyl records, including a handful of old 78's. I was extremely impressed with the results.



The final part of my digitization project was converting about 40 reel-to-reel audio tapes, for which I was also able to use the Behringer, interposed between my reel-to-reel tape deck and my stereo preamp.