So last week I bought a Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 ED film scanner and the Nikon SF-200 auto-slide-feeder.
Combined, it cost about $2700SGD, but I convinced myself that it would be worth it, allowing me to get more out of my existing library of slides and negatives, and in the future, make my photo development costs cheaper (eliminate unecessary prints and expensive slide-to-print charges). Developing, printing the 20+ rolls of film we took in Kerala last month cost nearly $400. Just developing the film, and scanning them at home would have been south of $100. Selective digital printing at RGB Color would have been a reasonable price.
So this weekend I have been busy learning how to use the system.
The auto-slide-feeder, which costs about 300$USD is a curiously-priced thing. It's incredibly simple, made only of plastic, and isn't that exacting. So why is it 300$? As far as I can figure, Nikon Marketing said, "someone who doesn't have to have autofeed can live with the single slide-by-slide feeder. The people who really need it, not having the time to feed slide-by-slide, can also afford the $300 charge." It has nothing to do with the mechanism, and everything to do with the users' alternatives.
How does it work? I had some fears. I'd read that it jammed easily and that it needed crude modifications to feed certain slides. In fact, the manual lists compatibilities, and the common 'plastimount' slides you get everywhere are noted in the "mounts known to cause jams" category:
I would expect that the certified mounts are harder to come by and more expensive. (approved mounts: GEPE 3mm, GEPE 2mm, REVUE, AGFA system G, AGFA reflecta CS, Reflecta GR, Kaiser SR, hama fix, and ROWI quickslide.) [Hama DSRs and WESSs can only be used in restricted orientations]
Anyway, the fact of the matter is that all weekend long I have been pouring box-after-box of plastimount slide through this feeder, and experiencing no jams. I think jams are a big pain if they occur (special utility software is included to assist unjamming the big box), but my guess is that as long as I don't put really fucked-up slides in, it'll be ok.
The scanning software seems pretty decent. It comes in two parts -- one is an applet to interface the TWAIN scanning client to other software (like Adobe PhotoShop). If you don't use Photoshop, you can pull up the simple NikonScan utility, which talks to the applet and loads in your scans. I haven't figured out how to do multiple-feeder scans from inside Photoshop yet (a question for Google I think), so I have been using NikonScan. This has worked fine.
Configuring the scans is taking some experimentation.
The scanner itself has many image enhancement features (ICE to remove scratches & dust, GEM to improve film-grain, and ROC for 'restoration of color' [in old photos]). This adds considerably to processing time, somewhat reduces the sharpness, and since these are brand new slides which suffer none of these defects, is unecessary. I am sure I will use, especially ICE, for some of my more-handled slides from a few years back.
The scanner applet provides the same "Image Adjustments" that Photoshop provides.
So my approach to configuring the scan parameters was: "Scan the slide only once, at maximum resolution, and with no image adjustment." My rationale was to handle the slide as seldom as possible, and as I need smaller versions, or adjusted versions, use Photoshop to modify the big master copy I already have.
In practice, this is problematic in that each image, at full-resolution mode (this is a 4000 dpi scanner) approaches 30MB as a jpeg. This is very ungainly when you are scanning in 700 photos from a single trip... Not sure what I should do. Perhaps keep scanning them this way, but then just archive them to many CDs? Keep a smaller, say 10MB image on my disk, and only get a super 4000dpi scan if I need it? Whatever I decide, keeping all my photos as 30MB images isn't going to work. They easily double in size when you start screwing around in Photoshop.
Also apparent more-than-ever is the need for some decent image-library software. Need to write up a nice post for some of the photo forums and see what comes back.
At any rate, now I'm in the middle of preparing some interesting presentations for Karavshin, which I'll be putting up over the next several weeks.
Posted by Nils Blutig at February 16, 2003 10:54 PM | TrackBack