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: NIKON SF-210 = USELESS JUNK
Summary: 1 Stars
If you are still reading these reviews and have not figured it out auto feeder is JUNK.
If you have some fantasy about loading a stack of slides, hitting a button and walking away expecting to come back an hour later and reload the are in for a RUDE awakening.
Before you buy this, ask yourself several questions:
1. Do you like rebooting your computer(even if it is a dedicated scanning computer with Win 2000 & Nikon's software and nothing else)?
2. Do you have the time to clear jams every third slide?
3. Do you have the time to reset your image number in the software after every jam/computer reboot/scanner reboot sequence?
4. Do you have time to go through your scanned image files to find the images of a white screen, because Nikon was too cheap to put a switch in the scanner to tell the scanner there is no slide in the scanning position(thus scanning a slide that is not there)?
The Coolscan 5000ED is not much better. Hope you like you slides with a blue tint added to every image!
12 years and $15,000 invested in Nikon stuff.
I am officially done with Nikon.
Digital camera Review: Necessary but poorly designed.
Summary: 3 Stars
This is a great item that will enable you to batch scan 50 slides - something that's necessary for my business. The problem is that I'm scared to leave it unattended. It simply WILL jam. I've had a few jams so far: a couple actually causing the slide to get stuck in the unit requiring manual removal and running a separate little software app to get the unit back to normal. Once it wouldn't get back to norm and I had to send it back to Nikon. They were great but it's a nuisance... will it happen again?
The other problem I have is that when it jams, it keeps trying to scan so that your hard drive fills up with big blank white TIFFS which is just silly, why doesn't the software look out for this and pause the process? If it finds 5 or more files with no colour info just stop!!!
FYI all of the slides I have put through are in very good shape, all the same size and with no bits of tape etc. on them. Imagine how it would jam with slides in bad shape!!
In short, the Nikon Coolscan series is a great product. Unbelievable quality at that price. And the SF-210 is a great workflow addition. But... it WILL jam and I think Nikon could go all the way to 100% and sort that out in the design.
Digital camera Review: Nikon SF-210 Auto Slide Feeder
Summary: 4 Stars
I have given this product 4 stars based on a simple and reversable modification to the feeder mechanism. If unmodified the product would likely rate two stars or less due to its tendency to jam when feeding slides. As modified it is satisfactoryDigital camera Review: Nikon SF-210 Auto Slide Feeder, Shame on Nikon
Summary: 1 Stars
I got charged the restocking fee after Amazon's false adverstisement(Nikon Cools Scan V ED + Nikon SF-210 in a bundle, although V EDdoes not support the feeder). But after filing a claim at Amazon, I got all my money back. So no bad feelings towards Amazon. I kept the slide feeder and ordered a Nikon cool scan 5000 ED, because manual slide by slide scanning is not really an option...
Now about $1500 later I find out that all the bad reviews about the SF-210 were no exaggeration. This thing is a complete failure! With regular Hama DSR frames I get an error message about every 5 slides. Nikon should be deeply ashamed to throw such a piece of poorly engineered equipment on the market.
Digital camera Review: Not Up to Expected Nikon Quality
Summary: 2 Stars
The Nikon SF-210 Auto Slide Feeder could be a great product if the engineers would address a few possible design flaws. First is the spring pressure of the pressure plate which appears to generate excessive surface tension with the adjacent slide and possibly compresses the slides below the minimum thickness tolerance of the feeder ram. This can cause dual slide feeds and resultant jams. Second is a ridge on the slide track that tends to grab a feeding slide, also causing jams. The spring tension can be changed by adding a paper clip (ideally one should use a strain gauge to measure the actual pressures and replace the spring with one of less tension). The ridge can be camfered or radiused to eliminate the grab. After doing the above, it has worked fine without a jam in over a 1000 slides. That said, one should not have to pay $400+ for a Nikon product that provides sub optimum performance without user modifications. I am trying to contact Nikon to see if they too believe the above to be a problem and if they will provide a retrofit kit with better components. When it works, it works great and the ICE software does a remarkable job.