Nikon Super CoolScan 5000 ED Film Scanner by Nikon
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Digital camera reviews of Nikon Super CoolScan 5000 ED Film Scanner
Digital camera Review: An excellent scanner with lousy software...
Summary: 5 Stars
I've been using this scanner for about a year to scan my slide collection. First thing I learned--don't even try to use it with the Nikon Software (I'm on a Mac). Use VueScan instead. It works great and handles individual scans and bulk scans with ease, automatically naming slides to fit into my file naming system.
The scanner works very well. I've had no problems. The bulk slide feeder and the individual slide feeder interchange well and work well. Quality of scans is excellent. ICE (Nikon's photoprocessing method to reduce noise from dust) is great! I very rarely retouch slides due to dust. In fact, film grain is more of a problem.
Recommended!
Digital camera Review: An outstanding scanner and a pleasure to use!
Summary: 5 Stars
First of all, let me say I am a neophyte when it comes to scanning. My mother passed away recently and I wanted to go through my father's 20,000 slides and scan the best ones before they, as many before them, disappeared into the hands of one of my 7 other siblings never to be found again.
After culling my father's slides I ended up with about 1000 I wanted to scan. After culling my own slides I ended up with another 250 slides. Additionally, I had about 250 slides from my grandfather slides And after that I decided to go through my color negative collection and scan the best of those as well. A daunting project! But honestly well worth the effort.
Most of my father's slides are Kodachrome. Much has been written about the inability of this scanner to scan Kodachrome slides and said about ICE4 not working with Kodachrome. Well, I have some good news The ICE4 does work extremely well for the most part. However, with Kodachrome slides it does produce minor artifacts in about 5 percent of the slides. I scanned with ICE (not ICE4) always on and then rescanned if I encountered unacceptable artifacts. I did notice that the scanner ICE feature was more likely to be stumped by old Kodachrome slides where subjects were wearing shirts with stripes.
The GEM ROC and DEE (the other stalwarts of the ICE4 other than ICE itself) work on Kodachrome slides as well, but I found that the results were unpredictable and that I could achieve better results myself in Photoshop far more quickly. The GEM ROC and DEE features simply took too long and slowed down the scanning unacceptably. The results, for me, were not worth the additional scanning time. So I never used these features. But the "enhance" feature on the scanner I used nearly 100% of the time with great results - much better than the GEM ROC and DEE features.
The scanner is fast and does produce wonderful wonderful detailed scans, easily demonstrating the grain in the transparancies at 3000 and 4000 dpi. The Kodachrome slides were a challenge to the Dynamic Range of the scanner, but I believe that most of the detail in the shadows that is there was extracted. With dark slides I used the VERY useful gain feature turning it all the way up to 2 in the really dark slides. Unfortunately, Kodachrome, with all of its many attributes, does have substantial downsides including a very narrow exposure latitude and shadow detail is simply lacking. I think the scanner accurately reproduced the information including the colors on the Kodachrome slides, with perhaps a slight bluish cast noticed in some cases.
It wasn't until I was finished scanning all of the culled slides that I undertook to scan my select color negatives. And this scanner really came into its own scanning color negatives. Don't even TRY to scan color negatives without ICE because the results are unbelievably bad. Even pristine negatives have scratches and dust that magically are erased by the ICE feature. What a godsend. The scanned color negatives were just beautiful with very accurate color rendition. But immediately I noticed much more grain in the color negatives (Royal Gold and Fuji Superia Gold) than in the scanned slides.
One note unrelated to the scanner itself. Until you've used a digital scanner to scan your color negatives you can't begin to realize how far superior Kodachrome, Provia, and Ektachrome slides are to color negatives insofar as capturing detail. Even the best color negatives have much more grain that Kodachrome. And the difference in color negatives is substantial too.
The included Nikon software worked fantastic for me. I downloaded a copy of VueScan which according to many reviews is superior to the Nikon software and found that for me the Nikon software was easier to work with and produced superior results.
The software did cause my computer to crash occasionally which was an aggravation, but a minor one when considered against its many attributes.
Setup Summary: I scanned at a 8 bit color depth (to reduce file size to 55MB and because I could not see a difference between 8 and 16 bit depth in the old slides) and 4000 pixels per inch with the scan enhancer turned on and the Digital ICE turned on. I did not use GEM ROC and DEE because of inconsistent results. I turned up the gain as necessary for dark slides and turned it down for light slides. Gain adjustments were only necessary on about 15 - 20% of the slides. The only two variables that I used once I was set up and running were gain adjustment and type of film or slide. All other adjustments were made in PS IF necessary. The scan at these settings took 90 seconds.
Setting up the Nikon Scan window was a little tricky too. I placed the tool palette in the far upper right corner of the window with the scan window placed under it to the right. The image window occupied the largest portion space to the left.
I can recommend this scanner without reservation. It is a phenomenal piece of equipment.
Digital camera Review: BEWARE- no driver support for 64 bit Windows 7
Summary: 3 Stars
This is a great professional level scanner. Does a fantastic job on film and transparencies. BUT -- Nikon no longer provides drivers for Windows 7 on 64bit systems. You literally cannot install it on such a system. The most recent computer / system we have that will run the Coolscan 5000 drivers is an old Compaq running Windows XP. You probably can use it on a Windows Vista system, so long as it is not 64bit.Digital camera Review: Best 35mm film scanner under $50,000
Summary: 5 Stars
The previous generation (CS IV and CS 4000) were hard to top, but Nikon did it yet again. Scans are smooth and gorgeous, color accuracy (provided your monitor is calibrated) is unrivaled and the updated ICE4 including DEE are a blessing. In fact the scans are so good that I have started to prefer CS5000 scans from well exposed Fuji Provia 100F or Astia 100F slides than images from a 6MP DSLR. Hard to believe but thats true.Did I mention scanning speed ? I timed a 4000 DPI scan with digital ICE turned off, on a P4 2.6Ghz with 1 GB ram and USB2. It took 17 seconds from begining to end (excluding autofocus and auto exposure). Thats right. Actually three seconds faster than Nikon's claim of 20 sec. Beat that Minolta.
IMO the next step up can only be a $50K HowTek drum scanner ;)
Digital camera Review: Best Scanner I Ever Owned !!!
Summary: 5 Stars
I was skeptical that a scanner could ever reproduce what I shot on high quality slide film (ie, Provia 100F). I sold my film camera to buy a Professional Nikon DSLR and now I'm considering buying a Nikon film body again but still keeping my DSLR. The reason being is that slide film is still way better than digital and the Super CoolScan 5000 Ed makes the transition from slide to digital come true.
Your scans will actually represent what you recorded on your slides if you take the following steps. Set the resolution to 4000dpi, Digital ICE to fine, Multi Sample to 16x and Pixel Data Size to 16. It will take some time to sample a slide and your file size will be huge but if you bought expensive slide film because you take pride in your work then this is the way to go. I don't use the other scanning options other than an occasional Digital DEE set to about 10 or so to bring out highlights or shadow detail. Everything else is unpredictable and the scan takes longer. I save everything as NEF files and use Nikon Capture 4 and photoshop to tweak things. Saving as NEF gives me a true slide reproduction from which I can work from (ie, make TIFFs/JPEGs, smaller files and customize my slides without lost of the original scan). It's true these NEF files will not be recognized by Nikon Capture 4 as NEF files but recognized as a regular file.
To save time scanning, you could reduce the resolution to 2000dpi, Digital ICE set to normal, Multi Sample to 4x and Pixel Data Size to 8. These settings will produce a suitable scan that you'll be proud of.
I, too, had a steep learning curve with this scanner. I played with everything and had several hangups with this software. I read every review I could find and read every page of the manual that comes on the disk rather than the book because the disk is far more indepth. As for the software hangups, I did the following. First made sure nothing was running in my computer's background, next went into my firewall and stopped all internet activity incoming and outgoing and lastly went into the Nikon scan software and reset everything to factory defaults. It hasn't hungup once since then.
I hope this helps the frustrated users out there and for those who are thinking about buying a 5000. I do hope this helps you make up your mind. It's a bit pricey but you bought a good camera, you bought expensive slide film, put a lot of time and pride in your photography so this scanner is natural match and won't disappoint.