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Nikon Coolscan IV ED USB Film Scanner

Nikon Coolscan IV ED USB Film Scanner

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: If you ever printed color negative, you will love this
Review: Have tried a wide selection of film types and film ages and this scanner does a great job in reading the information and producing a really great scan.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: wonderful scanner
Review: I can't really add much to the reviews below, except to confirm what they all say. The money I spent on this scanner was very well spent. I'm having a great time going through my archives, scanning images, sending them to friends, printing them out for my walls and for gifts. I also highly recommend the Canon photo printers. Results are fantastic. Thank you Nikon, thank you Macintosh, thank you Adobe Photoshop. Canon, too.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Does Everything it promises and then some!
Review: I had planned to buy a Coolscan III from E-bay to catalog my extensive negative collection, because I couldn't afford the LS-2000. With the SCSI interface and the other technical difficulties of the Coolscan III, I was a little hesitant. Then came the Coolscan IV ED. This scanner and software package offered everything that the LS-2000 did, and is much easier to use and operate. I have not used Digital GEM or ROC, but the Digital ICE is amazing. My brother, a photojournalist, thought that allowing the scanner to automatically remove scratches was silly, since it could be done (so he thought) much faster and better in PhotoShop. After trying two scans of the same frame, he never scanned without the Digital Ice turned on again! The negatives I have are from the middle east, and are very scratched. Fortunately, the Nikon Coolscan IV has a forth, infrared channel that can detect what is a scratch and what is a line on the negative, and remove the scratch without any hint of what damage was on the negative. Using USB (compared to SCSI) with the ICE on makes for a longer scan time that doesn't get much shorter with lower resolution. I have something else open (I'm scanning now) while I work with it, but the results are worth the wait. There is some noise in the lighter tones (negatives, haven't used slides but the noise would be in the darker tones there) but I may try an aftermarket scanner software called Vuescan to eliminate that with multi-pass scanning. The CSIV doesn't support multi-pass scans, but with some aftermarket software it will. The Nikon Scan software is a little strange, and there's not much that's user friendly about it, but if you have a good working knowledge of PhotoShop, PhotoImpact, etc., then youshould understand the controls enough to experiment and figure everything out. If you are a professional photographer looking for something that will allow 11 by 14" enlargement from a 35mm negative, or just an ambitious amateur, driven by the peer pressure of your professional photog dad and brother, this scanner is the one!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Does Everything it promises and then some!
Review: I had planned to buy a Coolscan III from E-bay to catalog my extensive negative collection, because I couldn't afford the LS-2000. With the SCSI interface and the other technical difficulties of the Coolscan III, I was a little hesitant. Then came the Coolscan IV ED. This scanner and software package offered everything that the LS-2000 did, and is much easier to use and operate. I have not used Digital GEM or ROC, but the Digital ICE is amazing. My brother, a photojournalist, thought that allowing the scanner to automatically remove scratches was silly, since it could be done (so he thought) much faster and better in PhotoShop. After trying two scans of the same frame, he never scanned without the Digital Ice turned on again! The negatives I have are from the middle east, and are very scratched. Fortunately, the Nikon Coolscan IV has a forth, infrared channel that can detect what is a scratch and what is a line on the negative, and remove the scratch without any hint of what damage was on the negative. Using USB (compared to SCSI) with the ICE on makes for a longer scan time that doesn't get much shorter with lower resolution. I have something else open (I'm scanning now) while I work with it, but the results are worth the wait. There is some noise in the lighter tones (negatives, haven't used slides but the noise would be in the darker tones there) but I may try an aftermarket scanner software called Vuescan to eliminate that with multi-pass scanning. The CSIV doesn't support multi-pass scans, but with some aftermarket software it will. The Nikon Scan software is a little strange, and there's not much that's user friendly about it, but if you have a good working knowledge of PhotoShop, PhotoImpact, etc., then youshould understand the controls enough to experiment and figure everything out. If you are a professional photographer looking for something that will allow 11 by 14" enlargement from a 35mm negative, or just an ambitious amateur, driven by the peer pressure of your professional photog dad and brother, this scanner is the one!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Yes on negatives, no on chrome
Review: I made a big mistake buying this product. It does a fantastic job on negatives, and if you're only buying it for that, this is a great choice. Unfortunately, the product is abysmal when it comes to slides. It is wildly inaccurate when capturing color ranges on slides. After scanning, I typically need to push the red range up to the max, and pull down the blue and green ranges substantially. Technical support told me to reinstall their software. I've done that twice on three different computers. The results are precisely the same. Nikon tech support wrote me off after that. Don't buy this product if you use slides.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: great scanner
Review: I've had this since it was first released and have found it to be a superb scanner.
As someone else has pointed out, there are occasional issues with slides, but from my experience that is a glitch in the NikonScan software and not the scanner itself. Using other scanning software (eg. Vuescan or Silverfast) has solved those issues for me.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: It works with XP
Review: It comes with XP software and manual contrary to specs on Amazon Web site. It works wonderfully - installs wonderfully and produces great scans. Thanks Nikon and Amazon.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: It works with XP
Review: It comes with XP software and manual contrary to specs on Amazon Web site. It works wonderfully - installs wonderfully and produces great scans. Thanks Nikon and Amazon.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Changed my opinion
Review: Originally, I had very negative things to say about this product--namely problems with scanning chrome. Well, it took a couple of attempts over the past three years, but Nikon's support crew did a fantastic job once I convinced them of the problem, and they absorbed the entire cost of the repair (which was almost half the cost of the scanner).

In other words, Nikon stands behind its products. And you can't beat that. Buy it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The best way to go for scanning negatives
Review: The Coolscan IV is definitely worth the price for scanning negatives. I looked at flatbed scanners and cheaper film scanners previously, but in the end I bit the bullet and bought the Coolscan. I have no regrets about doing this. The resolution of the scanned negatives is amazing - I can see details that were not visible the original prints. What really makes the investment worthwhile is the Digital ICE technology, which "cleans up" dusty or imperfect negatives. I am in the process of converting my entire film library into digital images.

This brings me to the downsides of the scanner. It does not utilize USB 2.0, and the process of scanning negatives at high resolutions is very very slow. I basically have to devote 45 minutes to an hour to scan in a roll of film because I have turned on Digital ICE as well as the other touch-up features available on the scanner. However, this is by choice, so for people who don't want the highest resolutions, the process may be somewhat faster. The other problem is that the included software is very powerful but has a steep learning curve. I spent a lot of initial time tweaking the settings to find what produced the best images.

Overall, though, the gripes are minor since the quality of the images is so high. This has changed how I take pictures now. Since the resolution of the digital images is higher than any reasonably priced digital camera on the market, I am now shooting most pictures with a film camera and scanning the negatives. This provides the best of both worlds - a set of cheap prints as well as high-quality digital images. Now I just need to get another hard drive to hold all the images that I am scanning in...


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