>>Who remembers Polaroid, Polavision, instant home movies?
<<
Oh crap, I do. My very first camera as a Poloroid instamatic. Darn I hate being old to know about that stuff. I even remember the very first black and white VHS video camera we got in high school. We all took turns making our own 'TV' shows with it. Thought it was just way high tech and too cool. No one I knew could afford one at the time either (early 70s).

To follow up...
 

I ended up taking my 8 mm film--26 reels of old family home movies from the 1930s to the 1950s--to Dodd Camera in Cleveland, where "Elizabeth" performs the film transfers for $1.50/minute plus a $10 flat fee. Their transfer machine's CCD only has a resolution of 240 lines. To perform transfers to MiniDV rather than VHS, a DV deck is connected by analog cables to the output of the transfer machine. I had hoped to find a higher resolution transfer, but this is fairly cheap.

Some of the footage was the developed double-8 mm film that came in rolls of 25 feet as someone mentioned in an earlier post in this thread.

If the markings on the boxes are correct, some of this footage is from my great grandmother's vacation to Berlin in September 1938. I've never seen any of this footage, but I know that my grandfather took a still photograph of Adolf Hilter leaning out of a window on that vacation.

Sounds like you got about what you paid for. It will work for home viewing, and general archival purposes. The more expensive telecine transfers offered out there, are nice for doing "film to video" commercial work.