Novice Film Shooter, Caffenol appreciator

I'm strictly an amateur but I picked up a free film camera last summer and now I'm hooked. I quickly realized that it was going to be an expensive hobby if I sent my film out to get processed every time so I learned to do it myself and have enjoyed the process.

So now I have more cameras than I should and just bought an old G5 tower so I can run an Nikon LS-8000 I picked up for $100.

First of all, I'm envious of your LS-8000 for $100. They usually still bring in the low 4 figure range.

I won't look down on you for using a G5, as my main scanning platform is a dual 2.7 G5. With that said, you are not married to that as Vuescan will run on the newest computers today.

It takes roughly an hour to scan and process a 4x5 at 6200 DPI on my Epson V700(using Digital ICE) with the dual 2.7. A faster computer won't shorten the scanning speed itself as it's mostly a function of the scanner, but it can shorten the processing time.

The Nikon software is great(I have a Coolscan V) and a Mac in the 2010-2011 range running OS X Snow Leopard can still use it and will be a significant speed bump.

It was $100 because it wasn't working. ;)

Fortunately all it took was cleaning the mirror and re-lubricating the rails. I was hoping Nikon Scan would work on my 2011 iMac running off a Snow Leopard partition but no dice. The software runs, but it doesn't see the scanner which is firewire only. I have a demo version of VueScan but it operates the Nikon extremely slowly. There's no way to get it to generate quick thumbnails either from what I can tell, it has to run through a slow preview process. SilverFast could do the thumbnails (overview they call it) but it's $$$$.

The G5 actually isn't a bad solution. I run it headless and just use Screen Sharing, but honestly the scans I got from my Epson V500 weren't THAT bad in comparison. In fact I had to do a lot of tweaking with software settings to get the images to look much better on the Nikon. A V700 with it's ability to scan a lot a film at one shot sounds pretty nice.

That sort of baffles me that it wouldn't work in SL.

I have a Coolscan V, which admittedly is USB and not Firewire. I was given it in exchange for my old mac "expertise"(I've coughed up some rare G4 parts from my personal stash to keep a mission-critical computer at work going). The person who gave it to me was running it only using the Nikon software with SL on an Intel Mini.

I run my V700 over Firewire, but there again I'm running it directly from Leopard using either Epson Scan or Vuescan.

I also find the slow preview comment on Vuescan interesting. Under the "advanced options" one of the things you can do is set the preview resolution. I usually do 400dpi or so on medium format, as it's more than enough to guide your cropping and color adjustments.

Like I said, I have no issues using a G5, but I am mentioning that there SHOULD be other options if you want to use something newer.

BTW, the V700 is a great 35mm/slide scanner and a great LF scanner. I rarely use the former feature since it's easier, faster, and better on the Coolscan V-about the only time I do is if I want to load up a bunch of slides and do them in a batch(like if I'm making a PPT of someone else's slideshow). The MF holders are terrible, and this is a pretty universal criticism. There's an aftermarket holder that I plan on buying one of these days.