Reboot Room FAQs

  • Vintage Media Lab

    Our lab schedule is very busy and it make take several weeks or months to complete your scanning project. While you wait, check out other public libraries around us with similar equipment and other personal archiving services across the country:

    Everything in the Vintage Media Lab is free to use and was purchased through a Pacific Library Partnership grant in 2019! In other words, the only direct cost to you is the amount of time it takes to finish your digitization project.

    Photos slides: 30 slides per minute, or about 1 slide every 2 seconds. Your pre-sorted 80 slide carousel filled to the brim with photos can take as little as 3 minutes from start to finish.

    Photo prints: Our Epson FastFoto scanner can batch scan 35 photos at a time and takes about 1 second per photo.

    VHS and 8mm Video (Video8/Hi8/Handycam): This happens in real-time. 2 hours of video will take 2 hours to digitized.

    Super 8 or 8mm Movie Film: Approximately 35 minutes for a small reel of film (~50ft).

    We have an automated slide scanner and DSLR camera rig that makes this a fast and easy process. Follow these 4 steps before visiting the library with your vintage photos to make it even faster and easier.

    1. Make sure your slides are clean. Dust is the enemy of a good scan, and this is especially true with cardboard slides that have been sitting idle for many years.
    2. Preload your slide carousels. We recommend 80 slot slide carousel versus 140 slot carousels, which tend to jam our machine.
    3. Turn your slides so they're horizontal or "landscape" oriented. This is a small extra step but will make sure our camera captures the full image.
    4. Flip your slides so the "shiny" side of the slide is facing forward. Like #3 before, this is possible to fix later in photo editing software, but getting it right the first time can save you time.