Film Scanning Without Tears

By David Em

March 13, 2006

(Film Scanning Without Tears :  Page 1 of 1 )

It's another sign of the death of film. Over the last few months it seems every person I know has asked me to recommend a painless method to digitize a lifetime collection of slides.

Regardless of whether you're a professional photographer who needs to archive your life's work or a civilian who wants to archive your family snapshots, what's required is a method that combines high quality, speed, ease-of-use, and affordability.

A few phone calls and a little research turned up a good candidate--Nikon's $890 Super Coolscan 5000 ED, which has been on the market about a year.

Setup

The 5000 ED is a trim little desktop unit that scans 35mm and APS-size film. It comes with a slide mount adapter and a strip film adapter that can handle strips with between two and six frames. The two adapters are interchangeable. Nikon also sells some vastly overpriced optional accessories including a $450 50-slide bulk loader that has a reputation for jamming, and a $20 strip film holder.

The 5000 ED connects to Macs and PCs via USB 2. Setup was a snap, and the Nikon Scan 4 software loaded with no problems. You can access the software either as a standalone program or via the TWAIN interface in programs like Photoshop.

The software interface does the job, but as usual with Nikon, the implementation is a bit clunky. For example, scanned images appear behind the control window, requiring you to hunt for them. When instantiated within Photoshop, I wasn't able to access all the setup controls, requiring me to go back to the standalone version of the program and then restart Photoshop when I wanted to make changes.

Even using two monitors, I was constantly rearranging the work area. Some key features are hard to find, such as the scan resolution setting that for some reason lives at the bottom of the Crop menu. The capture software's not terribly memory-efficient, either. It usually seized up after a few good-sized 16-bit scans.

A First Pass

A few years ago, I tested Nikon's LS 1000 desktop scanner with disappointing results.

 Page 1 of 1