[actionfromafar]

Can vouch for this trick - Digital8 cameras with Firewire is perfect transferring analog Video8 / Hi8. The analog to digital path in the Digital8 cameras is way better than what you can likely scrounge up yourself.

Can be expensive to get but if the camera doesn't break during use you can resell them easily.

[icyfox]

I bought a Sony TRV120 10+ years ago, back when I was doing this conversion project for the first time. It's built like a tank and still works today.

At the risk of being smited by professional archivists, I'm willing to wager that 99.9% of people can't tell the difference between a $5k archival rig and one of these higher quality camcorders. At this point it really feels like the biggest inhibiter to good quality digitization is the decaying of the tape versus the archival setup.

That said - for anyone with the time, patience, and soldering abilities I would love a more proper A/B test with RF signal capture software encoding. Something like this:

https://rastrillo.ca/digitizing-video8-tapes-with-vhs-decode...

[actionfromafar]

There be dragons - crazy things like taking several captures of the same tape and averaging the frames and such. :-)

[ErroneousBosh]

I've ended up with three of the damn things, so if you are sufficiently desperate to dub your 8mm tapes that you're prepared to trail all the way up to NE Scotland I'd be happy to oblige.