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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 | Great Scanner
I rented this scanner over the weekend to start scanning hundreds of slides. Included was the SF-210 automatic slide feeder. I had imagined putting 25-50 slides in the hopper and coming back periodically to change them.
As it turned out, the SF-210 was a miserable waste of time. See my review of this product.
I had scanned slides with several brands of scanners (Epson and Canon) and found that the result was marginal at best because of dust and dirt. Regardless of how I cleaned the slides and the scanner, the dust was always a problem.
This scanner has the wonderful ICE technology which almost completely eliminates the problem. The 4000 dpi resolution allows cropping.
The software that comes with the scanner, and the updated versions available from the Nikon web site are both clunky and have not kept up with the times. More than a year after Windows Vista was released and they do not have a version that will work with it! I have been a software engineer for decades and know a poor user interface when I see one (Nikon Scan 4.0). For instance, when you choose preferences, it asks you if you want to save them, load them, or use defaults. Not how to set them. Often the software's user feedback is erroneous or confusing. You click on the Scan button and find a minute later that nothing happened. If the scanner jams, it doesn't provide decent error recovery and recommends that you press a button that does not exist.
If you know how to do photo retouching with Photoshop, you will find a way to set up Nikon Scan and then be able to produce some eye-popping results.
It is really unfortunate that the only automatic slide feeder you can use with this product is so completely flawed.
After giving up on using the slide feeder, I was able to scan slides at a rate of one per 2 minutes. | 5 | Today | Film Scanner may extend usefullness of film camera!
The scanner works well and its operation is straight forward. It is surprisingly noisy in operation, but this is apparently normal.
Be prepared for large files, if you want the hightest resolution digital photos from film. The high resolution of the film scan yields 20 megapixel digital photos from 35mm film. This means a large (50 Mb JPEG) per photo. Not everything needs to be scanned at highest quality. You can adjust the resolution of the scan, or the quality of the output file, to suit your needs.
A film camera, coupled with the scanner, yields the hightest resolution digital photos. This means my SLR film camera (which has not been used since I started using digital SLR) will now see service when I want the highest quality photos. | 5 | Today | It's The best But could be better
I have scanned over 30000 slide with my scanner with not to many problems one problem is that you get is over scan on lite colors white over black as an example as a bulk slide scanner goes it's the best one. | 4 | Today | Not bad, but not great, either
I've owned this scanner for about 18 months now, and also have the slide and roll feeders. I've scanned about 12,000 images during that time, both slides and negatives.
The good news is, that for well-exposed negatives or slides, this scanner is fast and does a very high quality job. The bad news is that the software is buggy, and Nikon's tech support is non-existent. There are still no 64-bit drivers.
I'm running XP-Pro on an AMD x2 4600+ ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe with 2 GB memory and around a TB of SATA disk. While scanning, one of the two CPUs is totally consumed, but this is probably because of the polled USB driver. There are 3 software errors that keep occurring. First is the well-known Nikon Scan has encountered an error and must close - sorry for trashing your data. This malfunction occurs about every 10-40 frames. It simply requires a restart of the application. It usually happens just after or during a preview setup, so the work loss is minimal, but annoying. Nikon support ignores all reports to their support site of this particular problem.
The second problem is that the scanner software simply freezes. This usually happens in multiscan mode. To recover from this requires that the scanner be power cycled and the software needs to be killed with the task manager. Nikon support has also ignored this bug report.
The third problem is that when a slide jams in the feeder, the application loses communication with the scanner and must be restarted. Not too bad, since I had to manually clear the jam, but really an indication of the poor quality of the software error handling.
The software is incomplete with the slide scanner, in that it doesn't allow a preview scan for each slide like it does for the roll/strip feeder. That is basically a software issue, although the sloppy handling and positioning of the $500 slide feeder is also in play, in that it is probably impossible to get a complete alignment of the second feed with the first. (It actually misses a bit with the strip feeder as well, although not enough to matter.
The slide feeder is a bit of a kludge. It will require some modification to get it to work reliably enough to walk away from, but after a bit of tinkering, cutting and installing a modified pressure plate, it now can feed slides that are in good condition well enough that it seldom jams.
Another problem I have is with the hardware specification - it claims a Dmax of 4.8, which is just the specification of the 16-bit A/D converter attached to the sensor. But the sensor has nowhere near that much dynamic range, so the specification is downright misleading. Because of that, this scanner continues the history of scanners having great difficulty with dense slides. While Dee helps some, the problem of the limited dynamic range of the sensor becomes readily apparent. The amount of smear across high contrast boundaries is intolerable when scanning some very nice Velvia or even Provia images. If you shoot slides for scanning, consider over-exposing by 1/2 stop or so if the subject can tolerate that.
As mentioned earlier, the multi-scan setting does not seem to work very well, due to the software crashing.
Scan image Enhancement is a totally useless piece of software. The ICE works well for dust removal, but may give some image deterioration on some Kodachromes, although most work out okay. ROC works quite well for faded images, such as pre-85 Ektachromes and older negatives. Occasional Kodachromes are also restored. But there doesn't seem to be any difference between the setting from 1-4 that I have been able to detect. And you'll get bizarre results if ROC is one and the n\image hasn't faded.
GEM is okay for grain reduction, but like most such programs it loses detail fast, so us it sparingly. Faster negatives need it, and some of the older or faster slides films also, but if you can get away without it, then don't turn it on.
Negative scanning is very good, with the colors either well-balanced or easy to correct (Reala, for example, needs some manual setting to get right). But the negatives are grainy compared to slides. So you either get dynamic range problems or grain problems. Pick your favorite imperfection. I find negatives a breeze to scan, but the ultimate quality is not quite as good as a good slide scan, provided the slide is not too dense.
So Nikon gets only three stars for this. The idea is good, but the lack of dynamic range and software problems, coupled with Nikon tech support's utter incompetence or non responsiveness turn this into a mediocre product. Unfortunately, there is nothing much better at a reasonable price. Drum or pseudo-drum scanners may be better (I wouldn't count on it, though), but I don't have 10k to invest.
You'll get as good an image quality from a comparably priced 10MP digital SLR, so unless you have a lot of old stuff to scan, this is not the way to enter the digital age at this point in time. D80, D200 and comparable Canon or Fuji DSLRs give images subjectively as good or better than the scanned images from this scanner and slide film. | 3 | Today | Great Scanner
I have used several other film/slide scanners in the past, the 5000ED really performs. I really like the multi-scan functions for higher signal to noise and 8 or 16 bit files. I highly recommend this scanner for archiving slides and film and for get a good digital image to work with if Photoshop. I have no problems producing 16x20 prints from scanned image. Quality in and Quality out. Quick scans for such high resolution with very consistent work flow. I will be doing a more in-depth review at [...] in the future. | 5 | Today | Great Scanner
I have used several other film/slide scanners in the past, the 5000ED really performs. I really like the multi-scan functions for higher signal to noise and 8 or 16 bit files. I highly recommend this scanner for archiving slides and film and for get a good digital image to work with if Photoshop. I have no problems producing 16x20 prints from scanned image. Quality in and Quality out. Quick scans for such high resolution with very consistent work flow. I will be doing a more in-depth review at [...] in the future. | 5 | Today | Defective Products out of the Box and Cost of Ownership
One star is not for how Nikon products perform once they work properly, it is a measure of the lack of product defects (quality) and the extra costs incurred by the customer to get Nikon scanner products to work properly.
I purchased a CoolScan-IV. When I received it, it was defective out of the box. I contacted Nikon technical support and they told me to exchange it for a new scanner. The new 12-Bit CoolScan-IV worked perfectly. When I was ready to upgrade to 16-Bits, I purchased a CoolScan-5000 and gave my CoolScan-IV away. What a mistake!
This "upgrade" scanner was a total piece of junk. The images were noisy. I immediately contacted Nikon technical support about the problem. After some back and forth, they told me there was nothing wrong with the scanner; I was the problem. I recently found an archive copy of an under-scanned photo that I scanned on the old CoolScan-IV. I compared the images. The CoolScan-IV produced a very good image. The CoolScan-5000 was horrible. Without spending hundreds of dollars to pay Nikon Service to correct Nikon's initial quality defects, I am stuck with a piece of junk.
NikonScan. NikonScan is the scanning software that comes with the Nikon scanners. When it works, NikonScan works acceptably; however, it locks up repeatedly requiring closing the program and reopening it. Earlier versions worked much better in this regard to locking up.
Bottom line, Nikon quality has deteriorated to become very poor. I just described four Nikon product quality problems (initially defective products). There is a fifth: Nikon does not stand behind errors that their technical service personnel make.
Each item described above had additional out of pocket cost or lost time associated with it. I know the scanners can perform exceptionally well once they are working to spec. I would recommend a Nikon scanner only if you are willing to unnecessarily pay out a lot of extra money and waste a lot of time correcting initial Nikon product quality defects and incompetent technical service advice. | 1 | Today | Nikon CoolScan 5000 ED
I'm switching from a Polaroid SprintScan 4000 to this Nikon unit because of what I'd heard about the imaging quality of the latter. So far, I'm impressed, especially with the in-system dust and scratch remover with the color images. I do do a lot of b & w scanning and printing, so, in that realm, there's no great difference except that the manual handling of b & w film strips is a bit tricky (with the Nikon). All and all, I'm very pleased with my purchase. | 4 | Today | Crystal Clear Images
Purchased this scanner based on the positive reviews for image quality and it has certainly exceeded my expectations. Software is easy to use and and with a little tweaking and experimentation cleans up the slides beautifully. Even incredibly dark, under exposed slides have been resurrected to reveal hidden gems. Scans in single pass mode create near perfect replicas of the original slides, comparing the scans to slides viewed in fine detail with a hand lens. Having scanned over 100 slides, I have experienced the software crash mentioned by other people only 2-3 times. But even then, it's just a simply matter of starting up the software again and I'm back up in running within 30 seconds. There seems to be some correlation to the crashes and waking up my computer from sleep. The scanning process does take a little longer than I would have hoped, but I'm sure that is due to my older computer which only has USB 1.0 capabilities (the scanner comes with USB 2.0 - which is much faster). Having said that, users with older computers need not fear, it's works perfectly with mine. I'm currenly running Mac OS X 10.4.8 on a Power Mac G4 tower (Dual 1.42GHz PowerPC G4 processors). | 5 | Today | Best slide scanner I've used
I haven't used many, but this works well for me. ICE is great for getting rid of little specks I can't see. I guess you could do without it, but you'd have to have clean room type slides, mine certainly weren't that clean.
Many of my slides were dark, but the ROC/GEM fixed most of them. I've scanned about 2000 so far. Some I felt were poor, so I rescanned them with ROC/GEM turned off, but couldn't really do any better by hand (but I'm not a super-photoshop expert.)
The scanner did a good job of reproducing the slides and correcting for their age. Sometimes the color correction was worse (< 1% of the time) because of odd lighting conditions, but I just rescanned those few with ROC/GEM turned off.
For some slides that had spots I tried Microsoft Digital Image Suite (it was installed on the machine I was using) and was pleasently surprised to find that it could remove unwanted things fairly easier.
On one machine I got garbled photos, it seems like the USB connection failed quite often, but my machine is suspect. I've had similar issues on the other machine, but very rarely and the software has noticed so I can rescan a slide. (when this happens it seems to lose a scan line or mess up the color for a scan line).
The slide feeder is a must for me, and it has worked pretty well although there are a few types of slides it jams on. (square or extra large frames). 99% of my slides work fine.
Occasionally the software fails, and usually I restart the program &/or power cycle the scanner. Usually it just seems to forget about the scanner after jamming. Rarely (< 0.1% of the time) it has scanned only the red channel or something, which seems pretty wierd. This instability is annoying but reasonably rare. What's most annoying is that simply resetting the software/hardware fixes it, so you'd think it'd be programmed to reset when it started getting confused.
Nikon says that their stuff doesn't run on Vista, however I ran setup with compatibility mode turned on for XP SP2 (right click on setup and click properties). After that it worked fine, and from the other comments it doesn't seem any less stable that what other users have reported.
| 5 | Today |
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