Do It Yourself 35mm Slide Scanning?

If you went to all the trouble to capture your precious memories onto 35mm slides with the beautiful color and detail that 35mm slides will give you, why would you settle for an inferior conversion to digital format?

If you do it yourself, you are not going to get the quality that we provide if you just buy an inexpensive scanner from Best Buy or Circuit City. They do have very liberal return policies if you want to give them a try. Personally, I can't see anyone that has been using 35mm slides because they love the color and the clarity of the slide, being satisfied with the low quality transition that you get from inexpensive scanners. Be sure to check the details in the shadow areas in our samples, above. Low quality 35mm scans just plug in completely and lose all details in the shadow or darker areas.

If you would like to send us ten of your 35mm slides, we can do a free test for you so that you can see what our quality is like. That way you will know what you are going to get from our scanning service. We want our customers to be happy with our product. Pick some of your really good ones and some of your really bad ones and see what we can do with them.

We think that you will find that we can do a much better job than you can do yourself even if you had the same equipment. Our Photoshop® guru has eleven years of 'on the job' experience so that he can do any color tweaking, trying to achieve pleasing color in each scan, where it is possible.

Don't waste your time and your money. You are going to be disappointed if you try to do this yourself. Old-Photo's scanning prices are so inexpensive and you will be so much happier if you use our services.

I can do plumbing and electrical projects but I am better off paying an expert to do them for me. These people know what they are doing and I know it is going to be done right. I also look at things like this and I know that my time is worth something to me. You may be able to do it yourself but how much is your time worth?

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Are You Prepared To Deal With Potential Equipment Problems?
We deal with these types of problems every day:

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One star is not for how Nikon products perform once they work properly, it is a measure of the lack of product defects (quality) and the extra costs incurred by the customer to get Nikon scanner products to work properly.

I purchased a CoolScan-IV. When I received it, it was defective out of the box. I contacted Nikon technical support and they told me to exchange it for a new scanner. The new 12-Bit CoolScan-IV worked perfectly. When I was ready to upgrade to 16-Bits, I purchased a CoolScan-5000 and gave my CoolScan-IV away. What a mistake!

This "upgrade" scanner was a total piece of junk. The images were noisy. I immediately contacted Nikon technical support about the problem. After some back and forth, they told me there was nothing wrong with the scanner; I was the problem. I recently found an archive copy of an under-scanned photo that I scanned on the old CoolScan-IV. I compared the images. The CoolScan-IV produced a very good image. The CoolScan-5000 was horrible. Without spending hundreds of dollars to pay Nikon Service to correct Nikon's initial quality defects, I am stuck with a piece of junk.

NikonScan. NikonScan is the scanning software that comes with the Nikon scanners. When it works, NikonScan works acceptably; however, it locks up repeatedly requiring closing the program and reopening it. Earlier versions worked much better in this regard to locking up.

Bottom line, Nikon quality has deteriorated to become very poor. I just described four Nikon product quality problems (initially defective products). There is a fifth: Nikon does not stand behind errors that their technical service personnel make.

Each item described above had additional out of pocket cost or lost time associated with it. I know the scanners can perform exceptionally well once they are working to spec. I would recommend a Nikon scanner only if you are willing to unnecessarily pay out a lot of extra money and waste a lot of time correcting initial Nikon product quality defects and incompetent technical service advice.

One would expect that a company developing professional scanners would have the pride to develop software matching in quality. But you would be greatly disappointed to discover that this grand heavy hardware comes with poor software and therefore only amounts to a mediocre product not worth the money. The software (Nikon Scan) is buggy, leaky and crashes after about the second or third scan of a negative strip. I am running the latest version of Windows XP, with all the patches, and basically have to stop every thing else from running on my 320Ghz, 2GB new PC. This buys me just another single strip before it either freezes, forcing me to kill the application, or it silently crashes. I don't even want to go into the usability and documentation. Enough said. Extremely disappointing and not worth the money.

I've owned this scanner for about 18 months now, and also have the slide and roll feeders. I've scanned about 12,000 images during that time, both slides and negatives.

The good news is, that for well-exposed negatives or slides, this scanner is fast and does a very high quality job. The bad news is that the software is buggy, and Nikon's tech support is non-existent. There are still no 64-bit drivers.

I'm running XP-Pro on an AMD x2 4600+ ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe with 2 GB memory and around a TB of SATA disk. While scanning, one of the two CPUs is totally consumed, but this is probably because of the polled USB driver. There are 3 software errors that keep occurring. First is the well-known Nikon Scan has encountered an error and must close - sorry for trashing your data. This malfunction occurs about every 10-40 frames. It simply requires a restart of the application. It usually happens just after or during a preview setup, so the work loss is minimal, but annoying. Nikon support ignores all reports to their support site of this particular problem.

The second problem is that the scanner software simply freezes. This usually happens in multiscan mode. To recover from this requires that the scanner be power cycled and the software needs to be killed with the task manager. Nikon support has also ignored this bug report.

The third problem is that when a slide jams in the feeder, the application loses communication with the scanner and must be restarted. Not too bad, since I had to manually clear the jam, but really an indication of the poor quality of the software error handling.

The software is incomplete with the slide scanner, in that it doesn't allow a preview scan for each slide like it does for the roll/strip feeder. That is basically a software issue, although the sloppy handling and positioning of the $500 slide feeder is also in play, in that it is probably impossible to get a complete alignment of the second feed with the first. (It actually misses a bit with the strip feeder as well, although not enough to matter.

The slide feeder is a bit of a kludge. It will require some modification to get it to work reliably enough to walk away from, but after a bit of tinkering, cutting and installing a modified pressure plate, it now can feed slides that are in good condition well enough that it seldom jams.

Another problem I have is with the hardware specification - it claims a Dmax of 4.8, which is just the specification of the 16-bit A/D converter attached to the sensor. But the sensor has nowhere near that much dynamic range, so the specification is downright misleading. Because of that, this scanner continues the history of scanners having great difficulty with dense slides. While Dee helps some, the problem of the limited dynamic range of the sensor becomes readily apparent. The amount of smear across high contrast boundaries is intolerable when scanning some very nice Velvia or even Provia images. If you shoot slides for scanning, consider over-exposing by 1/2 stop or so if the subject can tolerate that.

As mentioned earlier, the multi-scan setting does not seem to work very well, due to the software crashing.

Scan image Enhancement is a totally useless piece of software. The ICE works well for dust removal, but may give some image deterioration on some Kodachromes, although most work out okay. ROC works quite well for faded images, such as pre-85 Ektachromes and older negatives. Occasional Kodachromes are also restored. But there doesn't seem to be any difference between the setting from 1-4 that I have been able to detect. And you'll get bizarre results if ROC is one and the n\image hasn't faded.
GEM is okay for grain reduction, but like most such programs it loses detail fast, so us it sparingly. Faster negatives need it, and some of the older or faster slides films also, but if you can get away without it, then don't turn it on.

 

We purchased a Super Coolscan 5000 ED with SF-210 slide feeders, hoping to scan my parents' thousands of Kodak slides. The Super Coolscan worked flawlessly on single slides, but the SF-210 slide feeder simply could not scan more than 2 slides without jamming.

The instruction manual does say that the feeder basically works only with Fuji compatible slide mounts, and warns of problems with Kodak and other mounts - but it's buried in the middle of the manual and you don't find out until you've purchased the producdt. I have been unable to find those restrictions mentioned anywhere inthe literature. At nearly $400 per feeder, I would expect it to work - or at least have the sales literature mention its limitations.

I complained to Nikon, but never even received an email response. I will never buy a Nikon product again.

 

I have used the 5000 ED for the past week and my computer (running XP home edition) keeps freezing up after scanning 2 - 25 slides, forcing me to perform a cold reboot. I have sent a request to Nikon, but haven't heard a word. If only I could return this unreliable piece of hardware.