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I would forgive Nikon if this were a cheep scanner but at these prices it is unforgivable. It will NOT work on vista 64 bit and it is not supported by Nikon for this operating system. All the good things they say about this scanner is true. Now the bad.
A strip of four negatives utilizing ICE software takes about five minutes to scan. Noise level is minor. Easy to install and setup. Scanning strips is done in auto mode and is a great convenience. Very satisfied with scanned images and operation of this film scanner. Had it working within ten minutes after it came out of the box. Instruction manual easy to understand and it came with a quick start guide.
Not such a bad deal. Tracking resale prices on E-bay makes spending more to get the 16 bit scanner seem worth the price differential. As such, they are getting hard to find and the price seems to be going up (ie Adorama).
Actual review to follow.UPDATE: Returned this scanner and got the 5000 with the F-210 batch scanner. The scans of some of my older slides are just simply breathtaking. So far, so good.
The coolscan V ED has been discontinued with no evident replacement in sight. Any thoughts. Hope this helps.
You can still get them from Bestbuy for MSRP, plus tax and $6.00 shipping. I may still opt for the 5000 and return my V that is en route.
I've just used this item briefly, however the slide scanning function is simple and easy.As i understand it this item is supposed to correct for dirt, spots, scatches etc however I have not been able to see that as yet.The scanned slides still required a lot of cleanup with Photoshop.Small, functional and yeilds much better results than my flatbed scanner.
It is possible that the software was not optimized for Mac in general (it looks like a ported PC program) or that it was not optimized for the latest operating system (OS 10.5). The digital ice, grain reduction and light leveling software were reasons for the excellent results (along with excellent optics). I was using a brand new 2.66 duo core IMAC with 4GB of RAM, and it took nearly 5 minutes per negative to scan and save the photo. Similar to a past Nikon digital camera, this scanner tends to exaggerate the red colors, which I had to tone down in Photoshop (but could be done with the scanning software).
The software was intuitive and easy to set up. These 2 issues aside, I was quite pleased with the quality of the scans and the ease of setup. I expected that scanning at 4000 dpi and using the digital ice and grain reduction would increase the time of the scan, but was surprised that saving the photo to the hard disk also took a long time. The quality of the scans is outstanding.
The scanner is also quite slow when scanning negatives. I recommend this product (and a good book to read between scans). I shoot a late model DSLR, and was surprised to see that this Nikon scanner produced nearly equivalent quality photos from my older film negatives (at least the good quality ones). There were only two issues.
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