Auto Slide Scanners

I want to scan a bunch of family slides. The Nikon 5000ED scanner with
the SF-210 auto slide feeder retails for about $1500. Are there no
other brands? How does one find used ones that are reliable? Respond
to

On Jul 10, 4:27 pm, john wrote:
I want to scan a bunch of family slides. The Nikon 5000ED scanner with
the SF-210 auto slide feeder retails for about $1500. Are there no
other brands? How does one find used ones that are reliable? Respond
to

John,

When I was faced with the same question, I decided against the Nikon
automatic slide feeder since even my camera store told me they are
prone to jamming. I opted for a Konica-Minolta D'iMAGE 5600-2 instead
and am very happy with it. Unfortunately they are not available new
any longer, but I think my decision process and experience still has
value for you.

The time to load slides into a four slide holder is small compared to
the other time elements involved, so an automatic slide feeder
wouldn't save that much time. It takes time to air clean the slides,
scan, categorize, notate, etc. Unless you do that, what you end up
with isn't all that useful. I have had an outside scan service scan
some of my slides with mixed results. Compared to what my time is
worth, it was a very cost effective way to see what I had and, if
warranted, rescan the best ones on my own.

Interestingly, the first scans the service did for me were much poorer
than the ones I obtained directly, even though their Nikon Super
Coolscan 5000 ED was a more expensive scanner than mine. These were
old slides and had many scratches that my digital ICE cleaned up
nicely. I asked if they were using digital ICE-4, which is what I
have, and they said they were. But, whereas my ICE is either on or
off, he had settings and only after he tweaked his settings did he get
scans comparable to mine.

I did invest in an extra slide holder so I could be loading four new
slides while the other four were being scanned. Having an extra laptop
that can do the scans somewhere away from your normal work area also
helps -- it's a bit distracting to have the scanner grinding away on
my desk.

BTW, don't believe the manual when it says not to use ICE on
Kodachrome film. Try it and you may well like it. In my case, some 65
year old Kodachromes were unusable without ICE, but quite beautiful
with it.

I've really enjoyed having my family's old slides in a form that I can
view and share so easily. (Look into Phanfare.com as a way to share
with your family. They cost a bit, but allow full resolution
downloads.)

Hope this helps and good luck.

Martin

john wrote:
I want to scan a bunch of family slides. The Nikon 5000ED scanner with
the SF-210 auto slide feeder retails for about $1500. Are there no
other brands? How does one find used ones that are reliable? Respond
to

John,

To pay $1500 for a scanner would be ridiculous unless you have thousands of
really good slides to scan.

I recently bought a Plustek Optikfilm 7200, admittedly not automatic, but
with excellent optics and software (Silverfast SE) for around $150, and have
scanned all the decent slides I have had since the sixties.

There are many in-between slide/negative scanners which are semi-automatic,
and the Minoltas are worth considering, but unless you are a pro, the Nikon
is really overkill.

Of course, I am retired, and therefore have lots of time to spend on each
slide, but be aware that unless you do so, the results will be disapointing,
even with the Nikon, as some post-processing is essential if you want to
show your slides to other people, which presumably is one of the objects of
the excercise!

Dennis.

writes:
BTW, don't believe the manual when it says not to use ICE on
Kodachrome film. Try it and you may well like it. In my case, some
65 year old Kodachromes were unusable without ICE, but quite
beautiful with it.

Be careful, though. I don't use ICE, I use vuescan's corresponding
feature (infrared cleaning), but I'm pretty sure the issues wrt to
Kodachrome are the same.

Infrared cleaning is very usable with Kodachrome, but you must
carefully inspect the result and find out what the cleaning has done.
Details can be lost in contrasty areas, sometimes merely making the
image less crisp, but sometimes making it downright ugly. Vuescan can
show you what it has considered to be a defect to be cleaned away, and
that feature is very useful. What I do when the software makes a
mistake is that I save both a cleaned image, and an uncleaned one,
load them both in the Gimp (Photoshop will work equally well), and put
them in separate layers, the cleaned one on top of the other. I then
use the eraser to make the cleaned layer (totally) transparent in
those areas that were damaged by the cleaning, allowing that part of
the uncleaned image to become visible instead. Zoom in to 100% and
toggle the visibility of the upper layer back and forth. That way you
see very clearly what has been cleaned away, and what to correct.

I might add that most Kodachromes in my experience do not need the
above treatment; most of the time the infrared cleaning does a good
job entirely on its own, but be on the lookout for those times it
screws up, because it does!

--
Fredrik Sandström

On Jul 10, 7:27 pm, john wrote:
I want to scan a bunch of family slides. The Nikon 5000ED scanner with
the SF-210 auto slide feeder retails for about $1500. Are there no
other brands? How does one find used ones that are reliable? Respond
to


The slide feeder on the Nikon film scanners are very good with plastic
mounted slides, poor with old cardboard mounts, these cause a lot of
jamming. 50 slides is a lot to scan at once, could test the memory of
all but the most robust computers. The Minolta 4 slide holder is the
other way, a little short on capacity, I have a Minolta Scan Multi
with a 4 slide holder. Minolta scanners are discontinued by Sony and
only the latest had Digital Ice. Right now I am using an Epson V700, I
find it better in all ways than my older Nikon LS2000, and a little
less sharp but much more dynamic range than my Minolta. This scanner
is a flatbed designed for film, Epson came close with earlier models
but the V700 and V750 are comparible with the available film scanners.
Takes 12 slides, which is a good number, and has Digital Ice 4. I
don't use Digital Ice much because my slides are kept in sleeves, in
file cabinets. But if I see slides coming in carousel trays I will use
it, very effective. This is compatible with Kodachrome, I don't get
many Kodachromes so I don't know of any special procedures, the
results have been very good. Digital Ice doubles the time of a scan.

Tom

On Jul 11, 12:10 am, wrote:
On Jul 10, 4:27 pm, john wrote:

I want to scan a bunch of family slides. The Nikon 5000ED scanner with
the SF-210 auto slide feeder retails for about $1500. Are there no
other brands? How does one find used ones that are reliable? Respond
to

John,

When I was faced with the same question, I decided against the Nikon
automatic slide feeder since even my camera store told me they are
prone to jamming. I opted for a Konica-Minolta D'iMAGE 5600-2 instead
and am very happy with it. Unfortunately they are not available new
any longer, but I think my decision process and experience still has
value for you.

The time to load slides into a four slide holder is small compared to
the other time elements involved, so an automatic slide feeder
wouldn't save that much time. It takes time to air clean the slides,
scan, categorize, notate, etc. Unless you do that, what you end up
with isn't all that useful. I have had an outside scan service scan
some of my slides with mixed results. Compared to what my time is
worth, it was a very cost effective way to see what I had and, if
warranted, rescan the best ones on my own.

Interestingly, the first scans the service did for me were much poorer
than the ones I obtained directly, even though their Nikon Super
Coolscan 5000 ED was a more expensive scanner than mine. These were
old slides and had many scratches that my digital ICE cleaned up
nicely. I asked if they were using digital ICE-4, which is what I
have, and they said they were. But, whereas my ICE is either on or
off, he had settings and only after he tweaked his settings did he get
scans comparable to mine.

I did invest in an extra slide holder so I could be loading four new
slides while the other four were being scanned. Having an extra laptop
that can do the scans somewhere away from your normal work area also
helps -- it's a bit distracting to have the scanner grinding away on
my desk.

BTW, don't believe the manual when it says not to use ICE on
Kodachrome film. Try it and you may well like it. In my case, some 65
year old Kodachromes were unusable without ICE, but quite beautiful
with it.

I've really enjoyed having my family's old slides in a form that I can
view and share so easily. (Look into Phanfare.com as a way to share
with your family. They cost a bit, but allow full resolution
downloads.)

Hope this helps and good luck.

Martin

Well if you're done with it, sell it to him and you'll both be happy.

In article om,
wrote:

I have a Minolta Scan Multi
with a 4 slide holder. Minolta scanners are discontinued by Sony and
only the latest had Digital Ice.

Does anyone know, or can point me towards any resources which list,
which Minolta slide scanners had Digital ICE on them?

I tried going through the Sony website but there doesn't seem to be much
information there, and my Google-fu has failed miserably.

I've been thinking for a while about picking one up (used, obviously,
since they're not made anymore) before they become totally unavailable,
but I want to get one of the ones with ICE.

(I have a PacificImage PrimeFilm 3650 Pro3, which isn't a bad scanner --
its main feature is that it has an automatic 35mm strip-film feeder and
can batch-scan uncut rolls of film, but I've never used it that much.
The DMax isn't too great.)

Thanks,
Kadin.