Nikon support for film scanners

Is anyone having problems with Nikon scanners--I have a Coolscan V Ed--and Adobe

CS3 and/or Leopard (OS X 10.5) on a Mac??

 

I called Nikon but am being told there may be a fix in 90 days but are not sure,

inasmuch as Nikon my be suspending scanner support in this digital world. As a

Nikon user since 1955, I'm more than a little disturbed by this.

 

David Asgard

DavidAsgardPhD@AOL.com

What is the problem you are having out of curiousity? I just upgraded my OS a few days ago

but hadn't had a chance to test my coolscan post upgrade, you have me a bit worried. I'm off

for the holidays but will test it out on saturday.

I don't know Nikon's policy of late but in the early days Nikon was notorious about not updating scanner drivers for new OS's.

 

I bought an early Nikon 35mm film scanner that ran on, I believe, Win 3.1. When Win 95 came out the scanner wouldn't work and Nikon never updated the driver.

 

I would have thought that they would be doing better today. But maybe not. That's not a great motivation to buy a Nikon scanner.

I was not able to get my Coolscan 4000 up and running on my Mac with OSX 10.4.10 with

the Nikon Scan software, so I had to hook it up to my PC and use it there. I would hope

Nikon would keep their software working with OSX, not just Windows.

Check the Nikon tech support query database online. It says something about having to turn sleep mode off in the OS settings (I don't know macs ...) and then it should work. The note also says that to this problem don't expect a solution any time soon. If its any consolation there are also problems with Vista. Nikon has said that it is planning on providing an update for Nikon Scan for Vista, but even now it should work in compatibility mode.

 

I think it's just as much a problem of the OS manufacturers because they constantly keep changing the OS to be incompatible with older hardware.

Most reputable hardware vendors update their drivers to be compatible with new OS's. Those that don't won't get my future business.

 

I doubt that I will ever be in the market for a new film scanner. But if so it will NOT be a Nikon.

Hey I just got home to try out 10.5 and nikon scan, it works fine on my dual 1.8 ppc G5. It

also worked fine w/ 10.4 (but i did have to turn the power modes off or end up with the

machine not waking up properly). My Nikonscan is the 5000. I was just on holiday with a

friend of mine who has the V and a dual G5 2.0 and it also works fine on that as well.

Curtis, that's tough because no one makes a reasonably priced high quality film scanner but Nikon. In any case Vuescan runs on all OSs pretty much so we're covered.

 

The rest of the scanners are either crappy or cost at least $5k.

The number of film scanners available is wanning. They are on par with a new VHS unit, a new dialup modem, a new enlarger. All of these products are mature and have a glut of used models that are on the market. Not having driver support for the latest OS is nothing new with scanners; its decades old. Here I have one thats a 36" wide engineering scanner that only works under DOS; and others that are work only under win95 or NT4; and some that work only under win2000 and below; but not XP. Both the newer Mac OS and Vista are going to further cut the cord for older devices. A very practical way is to just use your older dream machine as a dedicated scan station; and thus avoid the all in one box. It frees up the more expensive box for actual photoshop work; itstead of being a slave to a slowpoke scanner.

Ilkka, my present film scanner is a Minolta Dual Scan III (AF-2840). I've had it about four years now and it was very inexpensive ($250).

 

It has served my purpose quite well. I've scanned several thousand frames of slide and print film now dating back to the late 50's. I guess with new media the scanner might be the weak link. But with old media (that hasn't been properly cared for) the media is by far the weak link.

 

I don't know anything about Nikon's newer lower priced scanners but the one I bought was their first offering (an LS-1 as I recall that cost well over $1,000) and it was really poor due the limited color depth resolution (8 bits) and to the fact that slides and film strips were fed directly into the machine.

 

The Minolta samples at 12 bits and has plastic mounts for filmstrips and multiple slides. This works much better at least for dog-eared slides and severely warped filmstrips.

 

But, like I said, I may expose another role of film for old times sake, but I doubt that I will ever have the need of another film scanner.

The current Nikon Coolscans are very nice. They also provide better evenness of focus than the latest Minolta scanners (we did a comparison some time ago). They do it by focusing separately for each step along the long dimension of the film. The SA-21 prevents flatness issues as far as film which is warped along the short dimension of the film. Long dimension is covered by the moving focus.

 

Bit depth is 14 for the entry level model (V) and 16 for the LS-5000 and LS-9000. That's for the ADC but obviously there is some noise in the shadows.

 

I shoot film all the time (as well as digital) and have no intentions of stopping (not in the next ten years or so). I have much use for my film scanners.

 

BTW I don't agree that old film somehow doesn't need a new scanner. My dad's Kodachrome II and 25 scans much better on the LS-9000 than it does on any previous scanner I've tried. Truly a great film.

 

The current Nikon scanner hardware is unfortunately without competition in its price class and the only weak link as far as I am concerned is that their software tends to crash every once in a while. I suppose I could get Silverfast but even that doesn't have a version for Vista and one is required to buy a separate license for each different scanner model - too expensive! Vuescan is ok otherwise but my LS-9000 rattles when I use it and so I don't.

I need to try to resolve the rattling issue so maybe eventually I'll be able to scan in Linux (Vuescan is available for Linux I think!) and avoid having to deal with the activation stuff of XP.