35 MM Slide Film Scanner / converter

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Can anyone recommend a good scanner? I purchased one from Costco several years ago and am not at all happy with it. The electronic image it makes is lacking in any sharpness or contrast.

I have thousands of slides to convert.

Suggestions for a quality unit.

BigJim
 
I need one as well ... according to what I have researched the prevailing opinion seems to favour a Nikon Coolscan ... It looks like the more you pay ... the better they get ..image and speed.

These are dedicated film/negative/positive scanners...the flat bed scanners are getting better ..BUT a dedicated film scanner is still better
 
Nikon Coolscan V is what I use. At the time a new one was $500 +/- but I think these are no longer available new. With the trend to digital you may be able to find a good used scanner of whatever brand you decide on.
 
Godwin said:
Nikon Coolscan V is what I use. At the time a new one was $500 +/- but I think these are no longer available new. With the trend to digital you may be able to find a good used scanner of whatever brand you decide on.
Click to expand...
They are going for 500+ used on ebay. Reading reviews on Amazon it looks like there is quite a learning curve to get to know it. How has it been for you?
 
I don't think the learning curve has been too bad. One of my earliest goofs was failing to select the proper film type such as Kodachrome vs. an E6 processed slide. Carefully cleaning the images before scanning is something to do as the scan will show dust particles. I generally just scan the slide, crop, and make only minor adjustments to the scan. Anything beyond that is done in Photoshop. The image in my avatar is a scanned 35 mm Kodachrome.
 
x2 on the coolscan. The learning curve was not too bad for me, but I didn't try to do anything fancy. Just scan in the slides. The software is pretty straight forward if you've ever used a scanner or something similar.

the first is a slide (postive) from circa 1967, scanned at something less than the maximum resolution (probably no more than 1/4 max resolution). The result was a 500kb jpeg..

The second is a color negative scan at maximum resolution (I think) which yields a 16MB in tif format. The scratches on on the negative, not from the scanner.

I resized the first two pictures for MUD...

The third is a clip from the second picture at the original size.
V1_098.webp
SCT185.webp
sct185a.webp
 
I've done a lot of work on Nikon Coolscans, both pro and personal. Currently have a Coolscan V. The Nikon is definitely the best thing going in that price range and will do a great job. The idiot proof settings will get you pretty good scans on most slides, especially if you not scanning for publication quality reproduction. But if you want top quality you're going to need an understanding of color science and scanning in general to use the controls to their potential. If you're using a Mac, Nikon hasn't bothered to support NikonScan (their proprietary software) in years (may be the same for windoze--I'm not sure), so I recommend VueScan. It's an inexpensive shareware application and is probably the best scanning application out there. Very high end and supports any scanner worth using.
 
land crusher said:
I've done a lot of work on Nikon Coolscans, both pro and personal. Currently have a Coolscan V. The Nikon is definitely the best thing going in that price range and will do a great job. The idiot proof settings will get you pretty good scans on most slides, especially if you not scanning for publication quality reproduction. But if you want top quality you're going to need an understanding of color science and scanning in general to use the controls to their potential. If you're using a Mac, Nikon hasn't bothered to support NikonScan (their proprietary software) in years (may be the same for windoze--I'm not sure), so I recommend VueScan. It's an inexpensive shareware application and is probably the best scanning application out there. Very high end and supports any scanner worth using.
Click to expand...

I think your correct in that Nikon hasn't bothered to support NikonScan. I had to replace my computer last year and the new one came with 64 bit Vista. The NikonScan software did not work properly with Vista. I almost went with VueScan but through some searching found out that by loading VueScan, then NikonScan, and then removing VueScan the Nikon software would then work with 64 bit Vista. I've read good stuff about VueScan but didn't spend enough time with it to see the advantage of switching once I had NikonScan working.
 
AJP said:
I need one as well ... according to what I have researched the prevailing opinion seems to favour a Nikon Coolscan ... It looks like the more you pay ... the better they get ..image and speed.

These are dedicated film/negative/positive scanners...the flat bed scanners are getting better ..BUT a dedicated film scanner is still better
Click to expand...

Thanks you for the post.
Hi guys, Im a newbie. Nice to join this forum.
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I have a Nikon Coolscan 5000. It is not difficult to use and if you are scanning slides, the feeder is nice.
 
I have a Nikon Coolscan V also, and it works great. I like how easy it is to correct washed-out colors on the fly on my 35-year-old Ektachrome (sp?) slides.
 
I ended up purchasing another one from Costco. I cannot use it until I open it on Christmas. It scans the slide into a Jpeg format and writes the file to a mini memory stick. I'll report back next week.
 
I've got an Epson V500 and I'm pretty happy with it. It does 35 and 120 mm film, plus acts as a regular scanner. Although the Nikon Coolscan seems to be the standard for film scanners, I just couldn't justify the price for what I'm doing (old family photos), plus the quality of source image probably isn't good enough to really be noticable. The digital ICE is what really sold me on it, I did some quick tests with it and I can't imagine not having it on a film scanner.

Two drawbacks with the scanner is the extremely slow speed with the digital ICE (up to 40 minutes per batch of 8 photos) and no auto feed. If you're scanning thousands of negatives, it will get monotonous. I think it took me a week to scan in about 300 images, and I've probably got at least a few more thousand to go. At full resolution the image sizes are up to 100mB, but it seems like you can reduce it quite a bit without adversely affecting the quality. It took a while fiddling with the different settings to get a good compromise of image quality, scan speed, and file size, but once it's setup it's a no-brainer. I don't do any color correction during the scan phase, I can always photoshop later and still keep the original image.
 
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How's the quality of scans on that unit? A relative bought the same type of scanner, is it the one that scans directly to a SD card or memory stick in 5 seconds? I've tried a few of those types but was never happy with quality, but that was over a decade ago so I assume the technology has gotten a lot better.
 
ducktapeguy said:
How's the quality of scans on that unit? A relative bought the same type of scanner, is it the one that scans directly to a SD card or memory stick in 5 seconds? I've tried a few of those types but was never happy with quality, but that was over a decade ago so I assume the technology has gotten a lot better.
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Same here, I bought one years ago and it sucked. This one is actually OK, for my purposes.

I may post up some recent scans later this PM.
 
Scanned slide images

Here are some recent scanned images from a slide to a Jpeg. The resolution is not terrific in that some of the detail is not very clear or crisp as when viewing the slide on an 8 x 4 foot screen.
C-2 011.webp
Bodie_Camping 097.webp
Bodie_Camping 086.webp
 
If you are talking thousands of slides that would take a considerable ammount of time to scan all of those. I recently did a project of 14,000 slides and this is what I used. Amazon.com: Opteka HD² Slide Copier for Canon EOS Digital SLR Cameras: Camera & Photo
I found it to be comparable on quality to the high res scans I was getting off a scanner and it is a million times faster. I got down to where I could copy a tray of slides about every 1/2 hour. Then write some batch functions in Photoshop to fix all of the photos and you are good to go.
 
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