Glass Holders for the Nikon LS-8000/9000

[xaipemw]

Hello again,

 

I've got a question for you Nikon LS-8000 owners out there who use/have used

Nikon's glass film holders. Basically... how well do they work? :-) I know it's a

facetious question in a way, but I have heard great things about the Minolta Multi

Pro's glass holder, and am curious how the Nikon one stacks up against it.

 

Also, I saw that there are two versions--a rotating one made for scanning one frame

at a time, as well as a strip-sized carrier. Are these made using the same type of

glass?

 

I'm askign these questions because I had to return a Multi Pro scanner that I just

bought... the thign was defective. So now I'm mulling waiting a bit to see how the

new Coolscan 9000 shapes up.

[eric friedemann]

Martin, I just started using the LS 8000 and I bought the rotating glass holder:

 

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=productlist&A=details&Q=&sku=218837&is=REG

 

I think a glass holder is a necessity for 6x6, 6x7 and 6x9 negs. You have to sample at 4x or greater, but the non-glass carriers don't seem to keep the negatives from curving up a bit in the heat of the scanner box during the greater scanning times, which allows for slightly blurry grain where the film has moved. (And understand that for max rez, max sampling scans with Digital ICE of 6x7 color negs, the LS 8000 is scanning for an hour or more per negative.)

 

I'm pleased with the results from the glass carrier. Though I'm pissed to have to pay an extra $340, for a film holder that is necessary to the operation of the scanner.

[danny_liao]

the glass holder works great. i never had a problem with it. what i do is, i use the

glass holder to scan my important work and the regular strip holder to batch scan my

my negs to do proofs/contacts. i actually never had any problems with my strip

holder. it seems to hold the negs just fine. i never had a problem with my films

curling. but because of the "urban myth" about it and to be on the safe side, i always

do my final important scans with the glass holder.

[xaipemw]

Danny, which carrier do you own? The strip carrier or the rotating carrier? And why?

[danny_liao]

Martin,

I have the glass carrier that rotates and the standard strip carrier. The reason why I

dished out the extra $$$ for the glass carrier with rotating feature was because when

the 8000 came out, there was a huge fuss over the standard strip holder not cutting

it. Supposedly it was not doing the job of holding the film flat. Anyway, as it turned

out, my strip holder worked just fine but to be on the safe side, I got the glass carrier

too to make sure the film does stay flat. It works great. Never had a problem with it.

Except, it does tend to attract dust. Which makes it a pain scanning black and whites

because the ICE feature doesn't work with b&W negs.

[x]

The question from me would be "why do you even need these" ? The standard 120 film holder will hold the film under tension when properly adjusted so this ought to keep the film flat. As regards the film warming up and warping due to the time taken for multi-sampling, again, I would be interested to know why in practice anyone needs this ? At the risk of emphasising the point I'd say forget about the theory, has anyone seen an actual quality improvement when multi-sampling compared to just single sampling ? My experience with the 8000 is that the quality of results when single sampling is plenty good enough, which then gives reasonably quick scanning times, but then to be fair I'm not making huge enlargements and only scanning fairly good quality negs/slides. Having read various posts and reviews about multi-sampling the consensus view was that there was no real-world benefit to be gained. What's the experience of other 8000 users ?

[eric friedemann]

O.k., here's the thing. Years ago, some of my friends did 16-projector 35mm commercial slide shows. They mounted all the slides in glass mounts.

 

Why? The main reason was that in a standard cardboard or plastic mount, in a carousel projector most slides will "pop" because of the heat and look sharp at a given focus setting. But some won't, leaving these slides out of focus. By mounting the slides in glass, the film was kept from curving and popping and all slides focused correctly at the same focus setting.

 

Now let's think about the LS 8000 scanner. A 6x6-6x9 piece of film has much more unsupported area to curve than a mounted 35mm slide. The scanning box is all enclosed and generates a considerable amount of heat (this according to the Nikon manual). So, in the heat of the scanner a big piece of film is apt to curve just a little.

 

This wouldn't be a problem if the scanner constantly adjusted focus and scanned each section of an image in a fraction of a second. But this isn't the case.

 

Nikon's technical people have told me that to get critically sharp scans, I need to use over 4x sampling. This means that the scanner is going over and over the same section of an image. And the scanner does not constantly adjust focus during the scanning process.

 

Multiple passes also means that a given section of an image must be in precisely the same position each time the image section is scanned. Otherwise, you get ghosting where the film has moved even a teeny tiny bit.

 

And this is what I've experienced with the glassless medium format film holders that come with the scanner. The larger pieces of film start to buckle or maybe just expand just a little in the heat of the scanning box and when I zoom in on a scanned image to the grain level, I see ghosting. Again, understand that for a 6x7 color negative, 16x sampling, 4000 d.p.i., ultra fine scanning with Digital ICE, each image is taking more than one hour to scan.

 

The glass carriers, I bought the rotating one, do a fine job of holding larger images precisely flat. Again, MF glass carriers should be standard equipment with the LS 8000.

[www.whitemountainphoto.com]

I have the strip glass carrier. At first I had the regular carrier, but had a tack sharp stunning foilage photo that kept having a soft area. Not to mention the amount of times scanning, tension adjustment of the carrier, frustration etc. it was almost impossible to get it as sharp across the entire film plane. I've read that the plane of focus is narrow on this scanner, so I finally went out and bought the glass carrier. Problem solved, the very first scan of the same image was tack sharp everywhere. And yes I agree for the price of the thing, they should include a carrier that gets the job done properly, all the time.

[x]

Sounds like Mr Friedemann has been using the Nikon Hotscan 8000ED scanner !

 

I would be very interested to see a comparison of a section of the one hour scan with a simple one-pass scan to understand the real-world benefit of this extended scan. My understanding of multi-sampling is that its prime purpose is to reduce noise rather than increase sharpness. Indeed, quoting from page 58 of the Nikon Scan 3.1 PDF manual:

 

In multi-sample scanning the scanner makes multiple passes over the image and averages the results to reduce the effects of electronic 'noise', producing more accurate reproductions with smoother changes in tone.

 

The dark parts of slides I've tried scanning have not had noise as a problem. Grain, yes when hugely magnified. Any further information on this subject welcome (from experience, not theory).

[eric friedemann]

"Sounds like Mr Friedemann has been using the Nikon Hotscan 8000ED scanner!"

 

Reading the manual, Nikon is very particular about telling users not to block vent holes on the LS 8000. You aren't going to fry an egg on the top of the scanner, but the LS 8000 throws off about the same heat as a carousel projector.

 

"I would be very interested to see a comparison of a section of the one hour scan with a simple one-pass scan to understand the real-world benefit of this extended scan."

 

I'm not that web-literate yet. The difference is quality from single- to multi-pass scanning is night and day.

 

"My understanding of multi-sampling is that its prime purpose is to reduce noise rather than increase sharpness."

 

Accepting your premise, to get decent scans- according to Nikon Digital Technical Services- the scanner must make multiple passes. This means that every teeny, tiny clump of grain must be in precisely the same place on every pass, or your images won't be sharp.