Convert VHS Tapes to Digital

Not necessarily. Most customers drop tapes off at our Matthews location, which is the simplest route if you are anywhere around Charlotte, but you are welcome to ship them instead. We strongly recommend a tracked shipping method, since a lost box of home movies cannot be replaced at any price.

Pack tapes snugly so they cannot shift, and include a note listing what is in the box and how to reach you. If you are labeling tapes for organization, do it before shipping. Customers outside the Charlotte area, including the Charleston region we also serve, regularly send media in this way.

It will look like the tape, captured faithfully and then frozen in that condition. Consumer video from the 1980s and 1990s was recorded at a resolution far below anything modern, so a transfer cannot invent detail the camcorder never recorded. Expect soft footage that looks exactly the way you remember it.

What the transfer does accomplish is stopping the decline. Tape sheds oxide, binder breaks down, and every playback wears the surface a little more, so the copy you make today is better than the one you make in five years. Tapes that are already noisy or dropping out are the ones to bring in first.

You get MP4 files on a flash drive, one file per tape, and your original tapes come back to you. MP4 plays on essentially everything without special software, so the files can be copied to a computer, backed up to a cloud account, or shared with family the same day you pick them up.

Pricing drops as the tape count rises, so a full box costs less per tape than one or two. Once your movies are digital, hang onto the tapes for a while as a backup, and when you are done with them we can shred and recycle them securely as an add-on. Make a second copy of the flash drive somewhere else.