Nikon CoolScan V LS-50 ED Film Scanner by Nikon
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Digital camera reviews of Nikon CoolScan V LS-50 ED Film Scanner
Digital camera Review: Best tool for the job
Summary: 5 Stars
I'd wanted to scan in my 35mm negatives for years, not only archiving all our photos onto CDs that could be stored in a fireproof safe, but organizing them as well.
I estimated we had about 3000-4000 photos. My parents have thousands of slides in carousels that I would tackle after ours had been done.
I am right now about 3000 photos into my project. I was way off, I think I am only a 1/3 of the way through, judging by the boxes of negatives that remain.
The Coolscan V is the correct tool for this job. Before starting this project, I spent about a year researching various methods (in my spare time). I narrowed it down to the Nikon because of all the good reviews. What I didn't realize was how good the Digital ICE really is. For the first week, I explored all the different settings, trying to work out the best process for my archival project. There is a huge difference with ICE turned on. Negatives that have been thrown into a paper bag, stacked on top of each other (no negative sleeves) with scratches and dust produced photos that I was able to color correct (in photoshop) to look like they were taken on my DSLR today! (Except for the fact that both my wife and I look 15+ years younger...)
While you can do some post processing within the provided software, I found that the best workflow was to generate some presets, load a negative strip, click a few buttons, and let the resultant images "pile up" in "Batch" folders. I would then import these files (named after the pages & slot locations the negative would reside in after the scan) into Lightroom and start the metadata tagging process. The hardest part of the scanning process is the metadata tagging process (at least for me). I try to get the correct year & month, tag all the people in the photo, the location, etc.
The biggest problem I have with the product is the software. It is kind of picky and will crash after running for about an hour, usually when ejecting the negative. I have never seen it crash during a scan, and I've never witnessed corrupted images.
This comes with the negative strip feeder and the slide adapter. While it will accept negative strips of up to I believe 6 or 8 negatives, all of ours are cut into strips of 4 photos. Slides are very slow as you can only scan one at a time. It will do Kodachrome, you have to test out the different settings (I believe I turned off some of the post processing).
If you have a lot of 35mm negatives to scan in, this is your best option. Large numbers of slides might be a bit slow going.
It doesn't do medium format (120) you'd need to go to the 9000 for that (I have some TLRs and medium format film that I want scanned, still working on that one).
At first, I wanted to produce the highest quality, 16bit tiff images. The resultant files were just way too big. When I took a step back, I realized that a lot of our negatives are snapshots from point and shoot 35mm cameras, maximizing scan quality wasn't going to improve the quality. I am now scanning everything in at 240DPI and saving as jpgs. I am storing all the negatives in archival quality negative pages and naming the resultant files in such a way as to be able to easily locate the physical negative. During the metadata tagging process, if I find a photo that I just adore, I mark it (5 stars, color code, etc) and will then go back afterwards and produce the highest quality scan and save to Tif. This will allow me to get through my entire collection this year (I figured it would take a calendar year to complete)...
Digital camera Review: Beware!
Summary: 1 Stars
You may have trouble if you have an intel Mac. The Nikon Scan 4 software is old. I really mean it, it's years old. Nikon obviously have no interest in this product. Both
the scanner and it's software.
Digital camera Review: Bob King
Summary: 5 Stars
UPDATE MAY 30, 2010:
SOLUTION TO DRIVING SCANNER WITHIN WINDOWS 7: Upgraded (15 MINUTE DOWNLOAD AT ABOUT $90) to Windows 7 Professonal with XP Mode!
SOLUTION TO INCREASE SCAN SPEED: 1. Upgraded to 6 GB RAM, dual core PC
2. greatly reduced selections when scanning: I now use only ICE fine, increase chroma (saturation), slightly increase brightness, slighly decrease blue, check 14 bit. That is it. I saved this custom setting in "setting" (top bar in upper left hand corner). Scanning take about a minute now.
ORIGINAL REVIEW: Slow but professional quality. Not simple. Huge learning curve. Scanning is an art and craft. You don't learn it overnight or even after many weeks. For the money, this is an outstanding choice. Remember, this is only good for slides and prints
UPDATE MARCH 31, 2010: WHO HAS COME UP WITH A SOLUTION TO THE NIKONSCAN SOFTWARE INCOMPATABILITY PROBLEM WITH WINDOWS 7 (64 BIT) OS? I NEED TO RESCAN ALL OF MY SLIDES. THEY DON'T COME CLOSE TO THE QUALITY OF DIGITAL IMAGES RIGHT OUT OF MY 12MP D300, EVEN THOUGH WHEN SCANNED THEY ARE OVER 20MP. THIS TIME I AM GOING TO DO A BASIC SCAN AND TWEAK THEM IN NIKON CAPTURE NX2. BUT I CAN'T EVEN BEGIN UNTIL I CAN GET THE SOFTWARE TO COMMUNICATE WITH WINDOWS 7. NO, I AM NOT GONNA BITE FOR VUESCAN OR SILVERFAST. I BELIEVE SOMEBODY HAS COME UP WITH A WAY TO MAKE THE SOFTWARE WORK INSIDE THE 64 BIT WINDOWS U7 OS.
NIKON.........YOU SUCK FOR TURNING YOUR BACK ON WE WHO NOW HAVE THE WINDOWS 7 SYSTEM. YOU CANNOT CONVINCE ME THAT IT WAS TOO COSTLY TO TWEAK THAT SOFTWARE TO MAKE IT WORK IN WINDOWS 7. YOU SUCK AND YOU HAVE PERMANENTLY DAMAGED MY OPINION OF YOU.
Digital camera Review: Can't Believe I'm Back In The Sixties At Last
Summary: 5 Stars
My scanner arrived on 10/25/07 about noon. Hardware/software installation went very smoothly. I have a three year old DELL Dimension 8400 series computer with a Microsoft Windows XP Home operating system. I would guess I was up and running in about two or three hours, ready to scan my first images. Over the next two or three days I experimented with the scanner controls on my inital slides which I used as a learning tool. I had selected this scanner based on reviews and Q&A available on the internet and at this point I am very satisfied with the quality of the product. I bought it to scan something on the order of 1500 35mm slides and 600 126-film slides all of which date back to the 1960s and the early 1970s. At this point I have scanned about 375 slides -- mostly 35mm slides. For my purposes which are family slide shows and selected prints for a family album, I get very good results for about 85% of the slides using only the Digital ICE and ROC controls. The Digital DEE control has proven very effective for the few slides that have detail of interest in the under exposed areas of the image. For the remaining slides, I've learned to use the Curves control and the Color Balance (Brightness/Contrast)controls to improve images that were originally underexposed. I had initially been using Photobase 4.5 for brightness/contrast control for those slides.
I feel at this stage of my project I am still in the learning phase of the art and science of film slide scanning using the Nikon CoolScan V. I probably haven't read everything -- although I did try more than once -- in the Nikon print manual and electronic documentation about what a control does and why and how you might want to use it to improve on a given slide. In general I would say that their documentation is sufficient to get you started. But sometimes you need -- or at least want -- more than just a start. On a few slides I've tried to use the Manual Focus Adjustment to improve on the focus. The documentation on Manual Focus that I could find is very primitive. There is a Manual Focus Adjustment (Position) numeric slider control whose units are not identified. Further documentation in this area would be very helpful to me.
Over all, I am very satisfied with this product and can recommend it to others with a similar need.
Digital camera Review: Cool but Slow
Summary: 4 Stars
The claim made by Nikon regarding the speed of the Coolscan V ED scanner (14 sec for preview and 38 sec for scanning) is just a sales pitch. It takes the scanner nealy five minutes to preview and scan a slide at 2400 dpi with functions such as ICE and DEE on. The end product is a well-exposed image and the Image Correction Enhancement (ICE) works wonders in cleaning the tiny particles which cannot be brushed off even with a $ 25 static free brush. As a comparison my 6 year old Epson 1240 U flatbed scanner will scan at the same resolution in two minutes but it lacks features such as ICE and DEE.
The Nikon Scan 4 software is problematic. It does not work through Photoshop even though Nikon recommends to install their Nikon Scan plug-in file in the application's plug-ins folder. I tried this and my computer had the tendency to freeze. Something which did not happen during the two years since I have been using my Mac G-5 machine. When I called the Nikon technical help support I was told Nikon is aware of the problem and they recommended that I launch the scanner through the Nikon software only. Their software works fine most of the time but will not respond from time to time and the only way to quit the program is to force quit the application. This of course is problematic to say the least. Nikon said at this time they do not have any update to resolve the problem.
So I have to scan the slide, then open the file in Photoshop and crop and enhance it. This means spending more time in processing a slide.
Other than this the scanner works like a charm, focusing is sharp and its optics are great. The machine is quite noisy though. It is an excellent machine but Nikon definitely needs to improve the software. Given the quality of the scanned slides the Coolscan V ED is well worth the price of $ 547 including shipping.