Summary Fast and professional quality (14bit, Adobe RGB & multisampling) scans at home. Was the best economical scanner for quite a few years until the 5000ED came out. (Though digital SLR RAW files now have much less grain than E6 film, so the scanner only sees limited use.) Fastest way without buying the bulk roll adaptor is to cut your film into strips of 6 and feed it into the film strip reader (reads slides or negs). You can also mount it in the fidgety film holder they supply or mount your slides, though you lose a little bit of the edges when scanning these ways.
Strengths - Gets some smooth & fairly noiseless results with multisampling when scanning the slide darker or lighter than it was exposed.
- Digital ICE saves major retouching on scratched/dusty originals
- fast scans without multisampling
Weaknesses - Expensive attachments - in particular the bulk roll film adaptor.
- narrow depth of field so hard to get absolutely in focus sharp corner to corner sharpness (if you have a veyr slight curve in your neg/slide)
- digital ICE doesn't work for silver halide B&W negs
Similar Products Used old flat bed scanners with film adaptors can't get the detail out of highlights/shadows that this can
Summary The Nikon 4000ED has been in continuous use since Jan 2003. It has scanned approximately 15,000 immages with a mix of negatives and positives. After six months of continuous scanning, the one of the sensors failed and Nikon fixed the problem. The images were scanned primarily at 35% resolution, 4x scanning & 8 bit depth, then rescanned if the image was to be used at 100%, 16x scanning & 14 bit depth . The quality on Kodachrome was very good to execellent depending on the age. Some of the images were from the late 1940s. Other positive films were poor to very good depending upon the age. On transparancies shot after 1995 for Kodak and Fuji, the quality was usually very good to execellent. Negative film was suprisingly good with excellent color. Black and white was also scanned with good results when the film was dust free and scanned in the default settings. The bulk film feeder SF200 was a pain until we read an article at www.pytowany.com/ED4000_pg_4.html. This made the scanner a real workhorse. Certain slide mounts can still be a problem until the proper adjustments are made. One other problem that is worth mentioning is when scanning negative film manufactured between 1970 and 1975 approximately, there are additional holes along one side of the negatives that cause the photosensor-feeder to have big problems. The side of film with the extra holes must be on the left side of the feeder. We are using this on a PC with a P-II 450 MZ chip with 512 MEGs of RAM. ICE is slow. We also use a Mac Powerbook 1.25 with 1 GB of RAM. The speed on the Mac for ICE3 is a few seconds of processing time, but the scan time is only slightly less. If you are doing a lot of scanning using the bulk feeder with ICE a fast computer PC or Mac is a must.
Strengths Excellent quality. If the product does not function correctly during the warranty period, Nikon fixes it without problems. Ours scanned better after they fixed it that it did new. This was probably due to calibration and new firmware.
Weaknesses Soft focus due to warped film. This is especially noticable using the negative feeder. The Strip Film Holder resolves the problem, but it is a pain and is not a high produciton tool.
Summary This is less a review about the LS-4000 than the batch slide scanner attachment - the SF-200. The LS-4000 in itself is a very good scanner, the DigitalICE works extremely well and the color is beautiful. However, the SF-200 is a dog with most common slide mounts. Pakon mounts - which most labs I use seem to have jam EVERY time! PLASTIMOUNTS also jam. In fact unless you have a thicker mount like GEPE it will jam. If you do a search on the net you will find hints on how to glue an old credit card onto the SF-200 to allow it to feed PAKON and other mounts easier! Imagine how easy it would be to do this with a physical setting on the SF-200.
Nikon's support is also useless. I used to have an LS-2000 but within a year of purchase Nikon stopped making the software for Mac OS X for their SCSI model scanners. I thought that was very average. Fortunately the excellent VueScan from Hamrick Software does a better job and I still use that on the LS-4000.
Strengths Beautiful scans with excellent color, and dust / scratch removal with DigitalICE.
Weaknesses SF-200 is useless with most slide mounts.
No DigitalICE with Kodachrome or black and white film
Nikon software is OK, but they need to support new OSs longer. Very disapointing.
Similar Products Used Nikon LS-2000
Microtek 35T
Customer Service Not worth contacting - but you will probably need to. SF-200 is broken beyond servicing out of the box for most uses. Do a search on Google for credit +"SF-200" if you need a fix.
Summary Wow I just got done scanning in my slide collection of 13 Kodak trays. much to my suprise I went all the way back to 1965, and the slides came out awesome. The automatic slide feeder is certainly not the caliber of quality you expect from Nikon though and I had a lot of slide jams until I got online and used the old credit card fix. Hello Nikon!!!!!
Nikon software was easy enough to use for slides, but when it came to color negatives It gave me brain damage. To the rescue came VueScan. Hello Nikon!!!!
I now am happy about this expensive purchase and plan on using my images to burn to DVD movies with music, and play on my big screen TV. Yes if you get a HD TV it is almost like a slide projector. By the way using this scanner on some images taken with a disosable camera of my son climbing the wall at Zion made me gulp. The images were awesome. Using this scanner seems to blow away many of the digital camera images Iv'e taken and I might even go back to film all the way now.
Strengths Fantastic colors and sharpness.
Weaknesses Nikon software, and there @#$% slide feeder. However it's the only game in town.
Summary Scanner produces very sharp images with ROC/GEM off, slightly less sharp with them on - remember to dust the slides with air first! Disappointed with the SF200 feeder, the slides are not always fed straight and it jams from time-to-time - fix for the rotation problems as suggested by Nikon? Rotate them in manually in Photoshop afterwards!?! Very helpful.. NOT! Another issue is that although the scanner is capable of detecting where the mount is (from the IR pass) the software doesn't use that information to crop the images - so if you have different types of mount in a batch you have to crop them manually, also tedious - and could be easily fixed in software..
Weaknesses SF200 often fails to line up the slides properly, resulting in rotated images.
ROC/GEM *very* slow on a slower PC (P2-400).
No automatic cropping.
GEM causes a reduction in image sharpness.
Customer Service Not impressed.. Try submitting a query to NikonUSA - submit your question, then tell them you're in the UK, and watch in awe as your query is deleted! You need to register with Fotoshare in order access UK tech support a service which I don't want - hence the reason for trying the USA support first..
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