Nikon SF-210 Auto Slide Feeder by Nikon
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Digital camera reviews of Nikon SF-210 Auto Slide Feeder
Digital camera Review: Great scanner after a bit of fiddling
Summary: 4 Stars
After reading several reviews I was skeptical about this product because of the reports of frequent jamming, but it is the only system available for digitizing a gozillion slides. I found several fixes and used a paper clip to extend the origin of the slide feed compression spring. It was an easy fix after unscrewing a few (7 to be exact) screws. Here's the link for the fix I used:
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1007&message=16118672
Here's a link for another type of fix:
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1007&message=15300370
After that fix it worked well. HOWEVER there is a slide depth adjustment that needs to be paid attention to. Each of my carousels of slides had slightly different widths (I'm talking about fractions of millimeters) so I had to pay attention to the depth adjustment to not pull 2 slides at once. Also you need to be careful about orienting the slides horizontally.
Having said that and after a brief modification as well as a bit of a steep but brief learning curve, the slide feeder and the LC5000 scanner work well together. I have not as yet scanned a 50 slide batch, but so far a batch of 25 has worked well.
It is a pain in the butt that one has to modify a $450 product to get it to work right, but when it works, it is an immense time saver.
I do like the Nikon Scan 4.0.2 software that came with the scanner. There are a good number of image format options from which to choose. I do additional post work in Photoshop after the software digitizes the images.
Digital camera Review: I'm stumped - it works!
Summary: 4 Stars
Wow! I read all the reviews, was expecting to be disappointed, and then a friend bought the 5000 ED and scanner feeder and loaned them to me for a couple of months. I started with ten slides at a time... and it worked. I slowly worked my way up to 40, and after 600 slides, it has jammed once. The most annoying thing is that I have to count the slides before I put them in so that the feeder knows how many slides to scan. Counting is a little beneath me, I guess, but it's a compromise I can handle. I have had to reboot twice on an XP machine with multiple apps and 4 UBS ports running simultaneously, but compared with one slide at a time (a la the scsi slide scanner I had 5 years ago) this is pure luxury. If the Nikon guys are reading, the machine does work a little like a Rube-Goldberg contraption, and I find myself checking on it more often than I might, but it really does work.Digital camera Review: It jams, but still worth having
Summary: 3 Stars
I'm working my way through scanning several thousand slides dating from the 1930's to the 1990's. Manually feeding every one just isn't an option. I bought the slide feeder and the reviews are correct: Nikon really should have produced a better product than this. It's not very well designed and has a "cheap plastic" feel.
That said, it's still worth having. Slides that are nice and flat and in good condition generally will feed through without problem. So one strategy is to sort out the good ones, start the scanner going, and go take a walk. If the slides were all in good condition, then usually the entire stack will go through successfully. This is true even for ancient slides from the 1950's!
Warped slides... even microscopically warped slides... well, lots of them will jam. One philosophy is to just let the thing jam. Take a short walk instead of a long walk and just accept that when you come back you'll find it jammed. With practice, recovering from a jam isn't that big a deal.
The final alternative is to not let it jam: with prompt intervention you can keep the thing running. Stay nearby and work on something else. When you hear the sound of the slide being grabbed be ready to intervene the instant you hear the sound of jamming. Generally I can remedy the situation before the unit gives up and declares itself jammed. Not an ideal situation, but still much more efficient than manually feeding through every slide by hand.
The scanning software also leaves something to be desired. Some combinations of settings in the Nikon scan software will cause the software to crash in batch scan mode... if you want to turn them on, you're back to manual one-at-a-time scanning again. In batch mode, all files are saved as monstrous 100+ megabyte TIF files, regardless of the TIF / Jpeg settings. You have to tell the unit how many slides to scan. "Just keep going until you run out of slides" isn't an option.
All these deficiencies are annoying, but there doesn't seem to be anything better on the market for batch scanning so I guess I have to live with it. For scanning thousands of high-quality 35mm slides, it still does seem to be the best choice available. The results are worth the pain.
Digital camera Review: It sort of works
Summary: 3 Stars
This thing is buggy, but 's better than the alternative of hand feeding a large number of slides.
Don' buy if you think you are going to put in 50 slides, flip it on and walk away. it will stop on about every 10th slide, jam up, and youll have to go through a process of extracting the slide, and restarting the software.
Reaally ashame that Nikon hasn't figure out to manufacture something that is more failsafe. I can think of lots of simple improvements that would make it work better.
Digital camera Review: Jamming issue solved ... maybe
Summary: 4 Stars
I've read of the jamming issue on several forums and had the same issue. I may - stressing the may - have found a workaround for it. Please note that I take no responsibility for anything that may happen from here on out ...
After struggling with this issue for a few days (I have 10,000 slides to scan), I sat and stared at it ... and, of course, it didn't jam at all. I left it alone and it did, so I took a close look at how it had jammed. What I found was that it had grabbed the slide to be scanned and started moving it and then hooked the inner edge (next to the film) of the next slide as it moved the first slide. At first I thought it was an inner edge to inner edge hook, but looking at the slide when I removed it I noticed two marks/dents on the slide. That's when I realized it was the moving shuttle (the white piece that slides the, well, slides) that was catching on the next slide. It was thicker than my slides are.
The solution was to build a small buffer to push the to-be-scanned slide out a little from the back plate - so the shuttle doesn't stick out further. I used eight layers of Scotch tape, trimmed neatly, and placed at the very top and bottom of the backing plate. It's gone more than 20 slides without catching, so maybe this is it.
Your mileage may vary, but thought I'd share.