Taking Analog Stuff Digital? Skip the Gadgets

If you’ve been lamenting the fate of your analog media recently, wishing you could bring records, tapes, or photos into the digital world, new devices are here to help. They just don’t do a very good job of it, laments David Pogue in the New York Times, reviewing the Hammacher-Schlemmer photo converter, and vinyl and cassette-tape converters from Ion.

The Hammacher-Schlemmer Photograph-to-Digital-Picture Converter is the worst of the bunch, producing worse transfers than a plain old scanner. Ion’s Tape2PC cassette converter works better, but it’s sort of pointless—why not feed a normal tape player’s audio output into the computer? Finally, there’s the LP Dock: nifty, but its much-touted ability to record directly to an iPod is cumbersome. (More digital media stories.)