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Film Scanner (35 mm), 4000 x 4000 dpi, Color Depth: 42-bit Color, USB 2.0 |  |
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| Product Reviews from Amazon.com (Rating System 1 to 5) |
| Review | Rating | Last Updated | Nice scans but software is slow
I am very pleased with the scanner from a hardware perspective and quality of the scans but the software is very clunky and has not been updated for several years for Mac OS X. While it does function, it crashes often and is very slow on my dual G5 tower. | 4 | Today | Don't use for a large batch of slides.
Works very well and is great for negatives or small numbers of slides. However, it doesn't support the SF-210 slide feeder, which is essential for doing large numbers of slides. (despite its known problems with jamming, the SF-210 is much better than hand feeding slides individually)
If you're planning on scanning more than 100-200 slides, you really need a slide feeder. Trust me.
The stock software isn't very good, particularly on mac (it's a PowerPC app, so it needs to run in Rosetta on an Intel mac). I use Vuescan, which is much better and very reasonably priced. | 3 | Today | Awesome scanner
The ICE4 and software and scanner all do a great job of making old slides look like they were professionally restored, but with just a few clicks of the mouse. | 5 | Today | The best scanner as of 2008...buy it!
i have been a photographer for more than 30 years and I've been 100% digital since 2004 when digital SLRs finally became affordable. The huge and overwhelming archive of 35mm slides and negatives have been screaming for digital conversion. After several failed attempts with Plustek 7200 and Pacific Image, I decided to spend the $$$ for the best...well worth it! Sadly, the Nikon Coolscan V is a little tough to find as most internet website state "out of stock" or "backordered". Thankfully, I found a reasonable priced brand new unit on eBay for $596. I have completed my slide scanning with amazing results and now I'm working on the C-41 negatives, possibly a little too late as some of them are damaged beyond hope. The Digital ICE software technology is truly astounding. I have been scanning at 4000dpi and 14-bit depth...the resulting TIFF files are >100mb each so you absolutely need a huge hard drive and lots of memory (RAM). Unfortunately, the Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 software has limitations with 14-bit depth, however no limitations with 8-bit depth. All in all, I would recommend this to any & all photographers with archival needs...the caveat being this "the user needs to have experience with PC software" | 5 | Today | Best tool for the job
I'd wanted to scan in my 35mm negatives for years, not only archiving all our photos onto CDs that could be stored in a fireproof safe, but organizing them as well.
I estimated we had about 3000-4000 photos. My parents have thousands of slides in carousels that I would tackle after ours had been done.
I am right now about 3000 photos into my project. I was way off, I think I am only a 1/3 of the way through, judging by the boxes of negatives that remain.
The Coolscan V is the correct tool for this job. Before starting this project, I spent about a year researching various methods (in my spare time). I narrowed it down to the Nikon because of all the good reviews. What I didn't realize was how good the Digital ICE really is. For the first week, I explored all the different settings, trying to work out the best process for my archival project. There is a huge difference with ICE turned on. Negatives that have been thrown into a paper bag, stacked on top of each other (no negative sleeves) with scratches and dust produced photos that I was able to color correct (in photoshop) to look like they were taken on my DSLR today! (Except for the fact that both my wife and I look 15+ years younger...)
While you can do some post processing within the provided software, I found that the best workflow was to generate some presets, load a negative strip, click a few buttons, and let the resultant images "pile up" in "Batch" folders. I would then import these files (named after the pages & slot locations the negative would reside in after the scan) into Lightroom and start the metadata tagging process. The hardest part of the scanning process is the metadata tagging process (at least for me). I try to get the correct year & month, tag all the people in the photo, the location, etc.
The biggest problem I have with the product is the software. It is kind of picky and will crash after running for about an hour, usually when ejecting the negative. I have never seen it crash during a scan, and I've never witnessed corrupted images.
This comes with the negative strip feeder and the slide adapter. While it will accept negative strips of up to I believe 6 or 8 negatives, all of ours are cut into strips of 4 photos. Slides are very slow as you can only scan one at a time. It will do Kodachrome, you have to test out the different settings (I believe I turned off some of the post processing).
If you have a lot of 35mm negatives to scan in, this is your best option. Large numbers of slides might be a bit slow going.
It doesn't do medium format (120) you'd need to go to the 9000 for that (I have some TLRs and medium format film that I want scanned, still working on that one).
At first, I wanted to produce the highest quality, 16bit tiff images. The resultant files were just way too big. When I took a step back, I realized that a lot of our negatives are snapshots from point and shoot 35mm cameras, maximizing scan quality wasn't going to improve the quality. I am now scanning everything in at 240DPI and saving as jpgs. I am storing all the negatives in archival quality negative pages and naming the resultant files in such a way as to be able to easily locate the physical negative. During the metadata tagging process, if I find a photo that I just adore, I mark it (5 stars, color code, etc) and will then go back afterwards and produce the highest quality scan and save to Tif. This will allow me to get through my entire collection this year (I figured it would take a calendar year to complete)...
| 5 | Today | I love it, but...
I have a collection of slides and negatives that I want digitized so I can enjoy them. I am computer literate and with the purchase of this scanner I now have 3 scanners (flatbed, dedicated document scanner and a negative/slide scanner).
There are 2 drawbacks to this scanner:
a) it's very slow. I recommend multitasking while scanning. (I'm on the internet surfing, but I have 2 Gig of ram on the PC.)
b) if you are going to scan large format negs or want multiple strips, better go look at what Epson has got. I found out later there's a model that has a way of putting in 4-6 strips to scan AND it'll go scan directly into Photoshop.
Would I change? I don't know. I'm satisfied with what I got. It's doing the job and personally I don't want to tweak every negative or slide in Photoshop. I would rather be selective because I'd never get anything done if I didn't. It's a very time intensive process as it is.
| 4 | Today | Reclaim Your Slides and Negatives
I know many photographers who have shot hundreds if not thousands of Ektachrome or Kodachrome slides in the past. Face it, the slides are getting older and you need to convert them to digital images. The Coolscan V will do the job beautifully. You can even retouch them with the included software, or any imaging software (Adobe CS). The process does take time (a couple minutes for a typical slide), but anything worth saving takes time. For the price, it totally beats sending your precious slides out to be processed or renting a unit where you're under a deadline to return it. Besides, you have full control over how you want them to look. Quality product, great outcomes! | 5 | Today | Gets the job done - but...
All the reviews for this product do a good job of summing up the products strengths, (good quality for the cost) and weaknesses, (SLOWWWWWWW). I bought my unit on Ebay and I intend to sell it there when I'm through with my project. There's no reason to purchase this unit new if you can avoid it. If you look at the contruction of the box, its bulletproof. This thing could survive in the Sarah. The only compliant I have other than its slowness, is the poor user documentation, which I think is typical. Because the doc's are so poor in introducing you to "how" to create scanned images from slides and neg's, it takes time to figure it out. Once you've gone through that process, the real time is consumed in the sheer process of feeding film & neg's into this bugger. I'm using the batch feature, with only IDC enabled, (not ROC or GEM), forget that. At least in batch mode you can stick in a strip of film, scan it in and convert to a file type of your choosing and then walk away and do something more productive with your life than looking at process ribbon scroll across the screen. Check on it through out a day and you'll be surprised to see how many negs you've managed to scan. | 3 | Today | Saving my slides
I was an avid photographer in the 70s and 80s and have accumulated numerous slides of my family. These slides are now starting to show signs of decay. Using the Nikon Cool Scan V has helped me to restore and retain the beauty of these slides. My only negative comment regarding this equipment is the slowness of the process. I can only scan one slide at a time and it takes roughly 45 seconds per slide. I am scanning them as TIF files and each slide is about 65 MB. The scanner does a great job of capturing all the details of the slides at this level of scanning. | 4 | Today | Pretty amazing
Why spend $500 for a scanner that can only do one image at a time, when you can get an Epson or Canon flatbed that will do a dozen or more, in one pass? Well, because the Coolscan makes surprisingly high quality scans whereas the flatbeds (which were never intended to scan small pieces of film) do not.
In theory, you can get very high resolution files from a flatbed (and if you spend $20,000 on a Scitex, you'll see that flatbed scanners can, indeed make great 35mm scans). But the $300-700 dollar flatbed scanners do not have the optics or precision to get the best from a 1" x 1.5" piece of film. Worse, the quality varies across the bed, with the center usually giving the sharpest scan. These scanners can generate very large files but if the sharpness, detail and bit depth (shadow detail) aren't there, file size does not matter.
I wouldn't recomend the big Coolscan unless you are very serious because you can get pretty good scans of medium format film from almost any scanner that has a light in the lid. But with 35mm the Coolscan rules.
There are two drawbacks, however. While the Coolscan isn't terribly slow, scanning one slide or neg at a time, is. The more expensive model, with the slide feeder may or may not be worth it to you. The other drawback is the NikonScan software which has a unique property--it does not work reliably on a PC and it doesn't work on a Mac, either. True, cross-platform non-functionality! Here, the solution is to use VueScan which can be downloaded for $39 and is trouble-free. | 4 | Today |
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