Professional Service to Convert Betamax Tapes to Digital
The Betamax tape may have lost the popularity contest to VHS, but they are quite popular among EverPresent’s 80+ person digitizing team. Betamax tapes did their job well, and we get great results in our transfers. We offer affordable, convenient services for our family clients, and unique advanced services for our professional clients. We look forward to hearing from you to figure out which level of service fits best.
“By making the hard work of digitizing and sharing easy for our clients, we will preserve our world’s history before old formats fade and family stories are lost to time. Our ultimate goal is to make your best memories EverPresent in your life.”
Why Families & Institutions Nationwide Choose EverPresent
- Value: The size of our company allows us to provide more for less. Our digitizing is higher quality and better organized – and we offer an array of advanced services you won’t find anywhere else. Our pricing is transparent and always includes 60 days of free digital downloads and sharing.
- Convenience: Home and office pickups, over 50 local stores and easy shipping options. And unlike other companies, we embrace tedious work like transcribing written labels into your USB filenames and DVD labels so you don’t have to.
- Trust: Over 50 million memories preserved, 30+ years experience, 80+ expert technicians. Alarmed, sprinklered, camera-monitored, US-based, high-tech lab. Advanced barcode tracking and email technology to keep you updated.
- Respect: No upfront payments and no rushed decisions. Deciding whether to proceed with broken tapes, or upgrade to ProResHQ archival files or restorative tape incubation can have a real budget impact. That’s why we include a free consultation after we’ve reviewed your materials to assure you pick the right options at the right price to suit your needs.
Betamax Tape Transfer Pricing
EverPresent’s unique approach to pricing:
- Our team will walk you through the technical options in advance before you commit to anything. It’s free to get your materials to us for an estimate and there’s no upfront payment.
- We don’t promote flashy discounts or expiring coupons. We offer volume discounts because it’s fair, and we apply them automatically.
- We offer the widest range of options and capabilities to assure your project gets what it needs, but out of respect for your budget, never more than it needs. In our business, one size rarely fits all (or fits in a box).
Ultimately, what we care about is helping families do this important project ONCE – and do it right the first time.
Digital PackageFirst 10 Tapes: $21.99/tapeTapes 11-20: $19.99/tape $16.99 for tapes 21+This 20% bulk discount will be applied automatically! |
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Great value for clients ready to download their files and back up on their own before sharing with friends and family online. Enjoy 60 days of app access for unlimited downloading and sharing.
Signature PackageMost Popular!First 10 Tapes: $29.99/tapeTapes 11-20: $25.99/tape $22.99 for tapes 21+This 20% bulk discount will be applied automatically! |
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Most popular. Simple, flat-rate pricing to have everything done, including labeling & cloud backup. Zero work and zero worries for you after we finish. Easy to share cloud access and included USB or DVDs.
Family BundleFirst 10 Tapes: $39.99/tape$29.99 for Tapes 11+This 20% bulk discount will be applied automatically! |
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Best value if you are doing this for the family and would benefit from extended time with your private cloud archive. If you need more than three copies it's easy and affordable to add them.
Professional Package$45.99 / tapeBulk discounts may be available upon request |
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Chosen by fewer than 10% of our clients, but popular with certain institutions and professionals. Unless you already know you want this service, you likely don’t need it.
3 easy ways to work with us:
HOME PICKUPS
Too many boxes to move on your own? Complimentary home and office pickups are offered throughout the East Coast for projects over $500.
LOCAL DROP OFFS - 75+ LOCATIONS
All readily available for convenient drop-off. See which store is closest to you. Our drivers personally transport projects to our local lab for digitizing.
FREE SHIPPING
We accept mail-in orders from across the U.S. We’ll email a pre-paid UPS label or apply a shipping credit if you ship on your own.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is my Beta tape PAL?
Beta tapes were also popular in Europe. If you have family there or traveled there with your camera, you may have a PAL Beta tape.
Read more about spotting PAL tapes…
5 Common Tape Issues
There are a lot of components to a video tape of any kind and they have their share of problems after so many years.
Read more common video transfer problems…
How to store your tapes
These are the best practices for how to store all of your home movies and Beta tapes to keep them safe before and after digitizing.
Read more Beta tape storage…
The easiest way to figure this out is to view the labeling on your tape. Your tape will tell you whether or not it’s a Betacam tape or a Betamax tape. If you have a Betacam tape, you may even see more indication of what kind of tape it is. You can reference the logos above for what you should be looking for and click here if you have a BetaCAM tape!
The answer to this depends on the tape. You remember that recording length war we mentioned? That means that some Betamax tapes can go up to 5 hours, and some Betacam tapes can go up to 3 hours, but there are a number of variables around how they were originally recorded that affected how much a Beta tape could record. If you’re wondering how many DVDs you’ll get back when you transfer your Betamax to DVD, we can tell you that our dual layer DVDs hold all but your longest tapes on one DVD.
It’s always a good idea to have digital back up, and if DVDs continue to go the way of the Beta tape they will phase themselves out eventually. Digital is the future, but it’s also nice to sit in front of your living room TV and put in a DVD of your favorite family memories. Consider getting one of each when you convert your Beta tape.
The primary issue is the equipment. You can find decent VCRs online for a few hundred dollars, and many families still own one. That’s not the case with Beta. Betamax decks will run you nearly $1,000 for a solid unit. Further, there are many other beta tapes. For example, we see plenty of Betacam, Betacam SP and Digital Beta tapes. These players cost $2,000+ and are difficult to maintain. At the end of the day, these less popular video tape formats lead to dramatically higher equipment costs to play and convert them, higher repair and parts costs, and therefore the prices for Betamax and other Beta video transfers to digital will always cost more.
If the original content was just an OK recording, VHS to digital is a better bet because it’s cheaper to transfer this file type. However, if the recording was pristine, particularly on the audio front, the Beta transfer on a HiFi deck is probably worth the upgrade.
Selecting a good service to convert Betamax to digital is really all about availability. In our experience, many websites list that they offer digitizing for the four main Beta tape formats. But often, one of two things happens. First, many providers only have one precious Betamax to DVD converter for each format, especially if it’s a non-US tape. Before sending tapes, you should email or contact a service to confirm their machine is in working order. Second, many clients say they have a Betamax, which is the most common Beta tape, but actually have a Betacam. For every 10 digitizing providers with a working Betamax deck there is probably one with a working DigiBeta deck. So we highly recommend being clear on what you have, and being super precise in your language when seeking quotes. At EverPresent, we have dealt with hundreds of situations where clients sent a Beta tape to a small local shop or a big national discounter only to have it returned not digitized.
Get an estimate on your Betamax to DVD conversion project!
Fill out our form or call to speak to a consultant
- Digitize Photos
- Video Transfer Services
- Slides to Digital
- Album & Scrapbook Scanning
- Film to Digital
- Audio Conversion
You’re in good hands! Our team has decades of experience turning millions of photos and videos into beautiful digital memories that you can share with others.
Instead it was cost that drove Betamax tapes out of the game. Consumers wanted something affordable and that wasn’t part of Sony’s business model until too late.