Life span of a film scanner

Hi,

I have a general question about the life span of a film scanner. I

want to buy a used 35mm film scanner to scan my old 35mm negatives.

I have a general question about the life span of scanner. I am not

familiar of the technology underlying the scanner. I tried to search

the forum to find an answer without luck. Can anyone tell me how

long can the scanner last or the bulb in the scanner last. Or how

many frames can the scanner scan before it dies? thank you!

More important than the life of the mechanical components of a film scanner is the life of the software. I have a perfectly good Olympus ES 10 Film Scanner which I am throwing out because it will not work on anything later than Win 98 and Olympus have walked away from supporting this product.

 

Buying a film scanner that is supported by Silverfast or Vuescan could be a good insurance policy.

My oldest film scanner is the Canon 2710; which is now 3 years old and doing fine on a Win98 machine. The film holder is abit fragile and is religously placed in a box after each usage. <BR><BR>My much used Epson 1200U workhorse FLATBED is used for scanning prints; and is about 2.5 years old. It has developed a few noisy pixels on its scan bar. These show up as vertical lines in the shadow areas. These pixels respond correctly in the levels 1/4 to full white; and only are seen in deep shadow areas.<BR><BR>We maintain a legacy WIN98 machine that has 3 scanners on it. One is SCSI; one is parallel port; and one is USB. The exercise in chasing down drivers for older scanners is a waste of my time. I use 7 scanners; some are 11x17 flatbeds that are many years old and work well. Moving to XP will scrap out many of these scanners; since drivers on many are not available. Maintaining an "older" WIN machine for the older scanners works well; and has "little farting around factor" to do any scanning. With most all upgrades; there will be some hardware problems; which is a massive sink hole time wise. <BR><BR>For black and white line art work; we have several 10 year old scanner heads. Only one in three works ok; the others have each dead pixel banks; so there scan width is only 27 inches instead of the full 36 inches. With old scanners; there is no support at all. The scanner companys need you to buy a new scanner every year to keep them afloat.

I've got an Agfa flatbed I've had for several years. It's seriously the easiest flatbed I've ever used and it's respectably quick. The only thing I've noticed about it lately is that it's louder in scanning. But I can't complain about anything else and for $70 at Costco it was a steal.

 

On the other hand, we've got Nikon 8000s that all developed the banding problem within the first month of owning them. If they weren't shipped that way (some were). Our older flextights get cranky and jam more easily than the new one, and the Nikon 8000s like to get stuck on medium format occaisionally. The Nikon Coolscan 4000 and IV both do stupid things occaisionaly with their automated film strip eaters, err handlers. The minoltas have held up well and there are a couple of Canon 2720s and a 2710 chugging along. My Canon FS4000 hasn't had any trouble in it's as of yet relatively short life. I keep it in plastic bags in a pelican case for travel. If anything were to lower the life expectancy of a scanner it would be carrying it around so I'm cautious to how I handle the thing.

My best guess is that my Supercool Scan 4000ED has scanned somewhere around 10,000 - 15,000 slides and negatives. I've used the roll film and bulk slide feeding adapters. No problems so far.

Ditto on the coolscan 4000, although I've done 20000+ and not a hitch.