[DigiCam] Slide scanners

[ShirleyK]

On Thursday, February 5, 2004, at 01:55  PM, Mike Cameron wrote:

> The Coolscan 4000 looked very interesting but it looks like it has 
> been discontinued and replaced by the 5000.

If you still want the 5000, check Nikon's site. They still had some and 
were selling at discount. Maybe they are all gone now? But I don't see 
the point since the new ones are probably as good or better and cost 
half as much.
>
> Has anyone seen any reviews of this new unit?  It is USB 2 instead of 
> firewire.  Don't know if that matters as most new Macs have USB.

You can add a USB 2 card or I believe you can use USB 1.1. Newest Macs 
have USB 2. Right after I got my 4000 (several years ago when FireWire 
was added), a comparison between the FireWire and USB versions showed 
essentially no difference in speed due to the connection.

Be aware that there are 2 nasty bugs in the Nikon scanning software and 
they are in no hurry to fix them.

1. There is a memory leak. You can live with this if you have lots of 
memory and quit the program every so often. You have to reboot the 
machine to get all of your memory back. This is definitely scheduled 
for the next update (sometime in the first half of this year).

2. More uncertain is the bug that introduces image glitches into the 
scanned image. It's supposed to happen only on dual processor Macs. I 
had about a 25% rate of glitches. It looks like two 4-pixel strips are 
interchanged. In some cases, you can swap them in Photoshop and make 
the image appear mostly OK, but not perfect. (You would only do this if 
you didn't have or couldn't easily find the slide. Otherwise, check 
immediately and redo the scan. It's unpredictable when it will happen.) 
I didn't see it until I started zooming in to fix red eyes. I redid a 
lot of the slides on an iMac and saw the glitch twice (and I wasn't 
expecting it so I didn't really check all of the rescans).

I bought the SilverScan software ($300) and couldn't get as good of a 
scan as I could with the Nikon software. Maybe the SilverScan software 
is capable of equal or better scans, but I don't have an hour or more 
to fiddle on each scan when I have thousands to scan.

While I think the Nikon may be one of the better scanners, their 
attitude toward fixing bugs is horrible and cost me many hours of 
rework (finding the bad scans, finding the slide that had to be 
rescanned, redoing it and all the work that goes with final 
preparation). You might want to look at another manufacturer. I don't 
have anyone in particular to suggest.

Oh, and by the way, I don't know if these bugs are specific to OS X. At 
least half of my work was done in OS 9. I've probably scanned about 
6000 slides and 2500 negatives in the last few years.

Shirley
>
> On a similar note, does anyone have any experience with the automatic 
> slide feeders.  I had heard the one for the 4000 had occasional 
> jamming problems.
> Maybe an automatic slide feeder is overkill.  Comments?