Old tapes sat in a cupboard? Bring them in and we'll transfer the footage onto USB — ready to watch on a modern TV, laptop or phone, send to family, or just keep safe before the tape itself gives up. Family videos, weddings, birthdays, holidays, old camcorder recordings — we cover the lot, as long as it's something you or your family recorded.
Old VHS tapes have a problem. The tape itself slowly degrades — colours fade, the picture goes soft, and eventually bits become unwatchable. VCR machines are harder to come by these days too, and even if you've still got one in the loft, most modern TVs don't have a socket that'll take it. The family wedding from 1992, the kids' birthdays, the holiday tapes from the old camcorder — they're all sitting on a format that fewer households can actually play.
Bring them into the shop and we'll sort it. Each tape gets transferred to a digital MP4 file, copied onto a USB stick, and you walk away with the digital copies plus your original tape back. The MP4 file plays on smart TVs, laptops, tablets, phones — most things. You can keep the USB safe, back it up to your computer, send copies to family, or sit down and watch tapes you haven't seen in twenty years.
Per-tape pricing with a discount when you bring in multiples. Each tape can be up to three hours of footage.
You can bring your own USB drive for the files to be copied onto — most customers do, and we'll happily use whatever you've got as long as it has enough space. As a rough guide, a 3-hour VHS tape transferred at standard quality is about 4-6GB, so a basic 16GB or 32GB USB will hold several tapes easily.
If you don't have one, we sell USB drives in the shop at standard high-street prices. Worth bringing one in if you've got a spare to avoid the extra cost.
Prices last updated: May 2026
Drop your tapes into the shop during opening hours — no appointment needed, and bring as many as you want to. If you're not sure whether they're in good enough nick to bother with, bring them anyway and we'll take a look. We'll have a quick check of each tape, write down what you've brought in, and confirm the price before anything goes into the machine. If a tape looks dodgy — torn label, visible damage to the cassette, signs of mould — we'll flag it upfront rather than discover it halfway through.
Once we've taken the tapes in, the transfer itself happens in real-time. A 90-minute tape genuinely takes 90 minutes of capture, plus a bit of time to check the file's right and copy it across to USB. Most jobs come back to you within a week. Before you collect, we'll play a few minutes of the converted file to make sure it's worked properly. If something hasn't come out right — occasionally an old tape has problems no amount of head cleaning can fix — we'll talk to you about it before charging for that specific tape.
When you come back to pick up, you get the USB with all the digital files plus your original tapes back. The files are named using whatever's on the tape labels, or however you've asked us to label them. The original tapes are still yours — we don't keep anything beyond what we need to get the job done.
The service is for personal and family videos — home recordings, weddings, birthdays, holidays, kids' performances, anniversary parties, family pets, the old camcorder footage from your dad that's been in a box for years. If someone in your family recorded it, we can transfer it.
Commercial tapes are a different story. UK copyright law doesn't allow shops to copy films, TV programmes, music videos or sports recordings, even when the customer's only intent is personal use. So if you've got an old Disney VHS or a recording from the telly that you want digitised, we can't help with that one. If you're not sure whether a particular tape counts as personal use, just ask and we'll have an honest chat about it.
Tapes with serious damage are also not always doable. Visible mould, snapped tape inside the cassette, or a cassette that's been physically crushed — putting these through a VCR can damage both the tape and the machine. We'll have a look first and tell you straight whether we think it's worth trying.
And it's worth being honest about quality. A well-stored VHS from 1995 will look about as good as it did when it was recorded — which is to say, not as sharp as anything filmed on a modern phone. Tapes that have lived in a damp loft for thirty years can show colour shift, tracking lines, or audio that drops out. We capture what's on the tape as faithfully as our equipment can manage. We're not in the business of restoration or making old footage look like it was filmed yesterday.
What's on your tapes stays private. The transfer process needs us to play the tape and capture the file, but we don't sit and watch it through — just enough at the end to confirm the quality check has passed. The captured file lives on our equipment only as long as it takes to copy across to your USB.
Once you collect, we delete our copies. Nothing gets archived, backed up, or kept. If you ever lose the USB and want another copy made, you'd have to bring the original tape back in for us to do the transfer again from scratch.
One thing worth saying: a USB stick is a single point of failure. Once you've got your USB home, copy the files onto your computer or to cloud storage as well. We've done the hard part of getting the footage off the tape; the long-term safekeeping is then up to you.
Drop by during opening hours — no appointment needed. If you'd rather check we can take a particular tape before making the trip, give us a ring on 07561 472955 or send a message on WhatsApp and we'll talk it through.