Rating  - Wonderful tool
I'm a fairly accomplished amateur photographer. I've got film from Africa, National Parks and other places, and have now put around 500 slides and negatives through this scanner.
It's *great*.
The dynamic range is fantastic. 'Dark' images come through wonderfully. If it was unintentionally underexposed, the 16-bit color depth gives lots of room for adjustment. I was able to rescue many previously useless images and get decent digital files.
Speaking of rescues, many old family photos have rolled through my scanner, and the pleasure of saving and restoring old memories has been of great worth.
The negative strip feeder struggles with strips less than two frames long; some of my old negatives were strangely cut, and I ended up enclosing them in plastic slide frames.
At full resolution and color depth, you can generate 120MB TIFF image files from a scan. You will want lots of storage.
The only weak point of this scanner is the software. It works, but it is unintuitive and quirky. Occasionally it crashes. Nikon creates great hardware, but the team that made the software should be bludgeoned for besmirching an otherwise great product. Plus- upgrades and bug fixes, Nikon? Where are those?
For those willing to pay a little more, Silverfast can step in with something more reliable and with a few useful bells and whistles, like automatic HDR.
If you need an excellent tool for pulling 35mm film into the 21st century, this is it. It's relatively fast, is accurate on the color, the scratch/dust reduction is awesome, and it's *only* a thousand bucks. Once you're dialed in on the software, you can do wonders with those old photos.
Rating  - Slow and tedious
Nikon makes great cameras but awful software and this unit relies heavily on software. The scanner is slow as can be and making pre-scan adjustments with the software tedious and time consuming. Much faster with Photoshop! Bulk scanning in not a viable option due to the time it takes per image. I had the APS attachment and it failed continuously to take the film in. I sent it back to Nikon for repairs with detailed description of what was wrong and it came back with the same problems unfixed. Tried it with different brand films and still wouldn't accept rolls. For such an expensive machine it is barely worth it. Certainly not if you don't have much time to fiddle. This is all sad as the quality of scan is clearly there, just the ergonomics of using this unit and the ridiculously produced software are a typical Japanese pain in the neck. If this cost 400$ which it should, my attitude would be different but for 1000$ this is a barely 2 star machine and a hassle at that.
Rating - Great Brand in cameras, but not in digital equipments...
I bought Nikon CoolScan 5000 ED to scan my positive and negatives. Machine scans good and sometimes perfect and before i bought it i thought it was my only need. But the scanning machine has to have a suitable software. The software they gave with the machine is really old and not user friendly. Additionally, with strip film holder, Coolscan automaticaly takes the strip but can not recognize the exact frame on the strip. Sometimes it stops the strip in the middle and shows one half from previous photo and one half from the next photo. Despite these unquality things the scanning performance is great.
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Customer Reviews for Nikon,9238,018208092383,0018208092383,B0001DYTOY, |
