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I bought myself a film scanner over a year ago, and I'm still delighted with it. Periodically, people have asked me how to decide on what scanner *they* should buy.
The main thing I learned, doing my own research and finally buying a scanner, was that there's a stack of personal and not-very-portable criteria for making a scanner purchase. The list of purchaser-questions I finally came up with are:
What are you planning on using the scans for? What kind of scan quality are you looking for, which is probably based on what are you going to use the scan for? How many pictures are you planning on scanning per roll you shoot? How much money are you looking to spend? Do you care about speed, footprint, connection-type, OS compatability?
I've got a Nikon Super CoolScan 4000, which meets or exceeds my minimum requirements in just about every category except those for which I couldn't find *any* scanner that met that requirement (like, I'd love it if I could find TWAIN drivers weren't so flaky. But I digress...). I'm very happy with it. Let me restate that. I can't think of any hardware purchase I've made that's delighted me this much since I added RAM to my very first computer so that it could finally run NetHack.
The Super CoolScan line is significantly more powerful than I need, but I bought this particular scanner primarily because it'll scan an entire uncut roll of 36 exposures of 35mm film without (much) user intervention (though it requires an extra adapter, which is not cheap). Feed in the negative, and in an hour or so (sometimes less, sometimes lots more; depends on the quality-settings), it's done. Unless you really want to scan uncut rolls of 36, and/or really want to be able to scan at a resolution that could theroetically result in 67MB TIFFs, it's probably overkill. The ability to batch-scan negatives beyond a filmstrip of six was rare, when I did my research. The only other one on the market I could find was from kodak and from the reviews I read, sucked. All that said, now that I've got it, I like the Nikon for lots more reasons than just the long-filmstrip-adapter. If 4,000 dpi and 67MB TIFFs are compelling, but the extra-long-filmstrip-adapter isn't, you might want to look at the other Super CoolScans. The 8000, for instance, is of similar high quality but instead of supporting long 35mm strips, it supports medium format negatives (which the 4000 doesn't; one of my only complaints). Stepping down a notch, you can get 2,900 dpi out of the Coolscan IV for something that's
probably around half the price.
Oh, and CoolScans of all sorts have Digital ICE, which does the absolutely coolest dust-and-scratch reduction I've *ever* seen (coolest because 1. it works *very* well 2. the technology they're using -- an extra pass with an infrared LED -- is interesting and made by a company that calls itself "Applied Science Fiction". Doesn't work on B&W negs, tho...just on color negatives and slides).
I'm pretty happy with the NikonScan software. It, like any software I've ever used that gets anywhere close to TWAIN, is a bit crashy, but the 3.1 software is more stable than I expected (and much more stable than the 3.0 that shipped with the scanner). I like that I've currently got several scan-preference-profiles for myself, and some for other people who use the scanner as well. I like the various ways I can tune the batch-scan.
Posted by sev @ 09:57 PM PST |