I got a Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 ED (sorry, that's really the name). Quick Summary: It's really great.
I have a big stack of pictures to scan. It's curious how good I was about writing careful notes on all the framed pictures of place/trip/event/occasion, film number, frame number and usually year. When the time machine is invented I must send thanks back to myself annno 1991-1996 for doing that. (It's also curious how it seems like I was a much better photographer then than now, but that's for another posting...)
I'll get to the fun ones with people soon enough (well, fun for the 5 occasional readers who knew me in that period. For you 2500+ daily readers looking for the regular serving of ... Actually, I've no idea what you are looking for!). Anyway, no matter what I find and scan I will post to my flickr account and occasionally to here or to vox.
The technical quality of the scanner is amazing. It almost makes me want to put batteries in the old F-90 and take some more. The new fancy digital cameras might technically have better resolution and all, but "it just doesn't quite look the same". Sob sob. Of course, the workflow completely ruins it. Even scanning a strip of 6 pictures (which the scanner can do by itself) takes forever and a bit too much manual labor wheras with Aperture I can "process" hundreds of pictures in a snap. (Duncan compared Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom a few days ago).
The scans show A LOT of detail. Also a lot of dust and dirt, almost no matter how carefully you thought you cleaned it. Fortunately the dust, dirt and scratch removal in the scanner is really good (except on some of my slides which I think are Kodachrome, more on that another time.
Only nit so far (I only opened it up and made a few test scans) is that it didn't come with the "FH-3 Film Strip Holder" so I can only scan framed slides or strips of 2-6 pictures.
For some of the pictures (maybe the one above included) it looks like it'd work better if I could take it out of the old glass frame and clean it better, but without the strip holder I can't scan them. And it appears to be sold out everywhere. Grrh.
Speaking of dirt, here's an article on how to clean the Coolscan 5000.
What about the scanner Knud Erik has? Isnt that one scanning without the frames holding the film? I think I remember that it was able to accept a simple film strip with 6 pictures with no frames at all.
Kaare,
Yup -- the 5000 comes with that attachment too. It doesn't work for single frames though!
I think my solution might be to get some glass-less frames and move the slides with "bad" frames to them...
- ask
I hope someone can help me here. I and my colleagues are all stumped by an issue we seem to be having with the Nikon Coolscan 5000. I just got the scanner last spring, loaded the software and tried it out before I went on summer break. So, I barely used it yet things seemed ok, auto color correct worked fine etc.
I returned in Fall and had recieved a grant so I got a new IMAC G5 (I had a mac marshmallow G4 prior). So, I hooked scanner to the new mac and loaded the software. I mention this since it is the only change I made that I can think of.
Now when I scan a slide the preview looks fine but when I actually scan it it comes up on my screen very faded, almost as if there is some sort of a greyish whiteish haze over the whole image. I have tried everything I can think of, returning to factory settings etc yet it happens with all images. These are slides that I scan in my Epson flatbed with no problem.
Any ideas?
No matter what settings I select the scanned images from my 5000 are always considerably darker than the original Kodachorme slides.
Any suggestions?
I just got the 5000 scanner and the previews looked great while the full scan was darker. I tried to improve it in Photoshop and it got duller. then when I zoomed in at very high magnification I saw that every other column of pixels was a black bar, like looking through a grating. the scanner was defective and had to be sent back.
Hi I am a little late here just seen Krista smiths trouble--one thing with kodachrome is that cleaning must be turned off also
(I don,t use nikon software but vuescan)if ther is an option to select filtype,use the correct one
The Coolscan 5000 is the most frustrating piece of equipment I have ever used. The stacker doesn't work half of the time and 75% of the time I startup the software and cannot get any response or the desktop is missing. IMac is only 2 months old and works wonderfully. Any suggestions...please!?!