Nikon Super Coolscan 8000 ED Film Scanner

Rating:
Summary: Nikon's Medium Format Film Scanner--the 8000ED
Review: If you have both 35mm and medium format transparencies and or negatives to bring into the digital age, I heartily recommend the Nikon Super Coolscan 8000ED. Firewire equipped, it is designed to work easily with the current line of graphics capable computers. Its bundled software has worked well for me (using a MAC with OSX and Firewire) and features three special capabilities. (1) Digital ICE3 will gently remove scratches and dust saving you hours of retouching (it doesn't work well with Kodachrome and black and white silver based emulsions). (2) ROC will restore colors to faded slides. It really works! (3) GEM gives you the ability to affect grain appearance. For the highest resolution imaging (4000DPI) the process takes some time. You also need to make sure that you have a fairly up to date computer. Some serious computing is going on here and with file sizes in the hundreds of Megabytes, you can't run this with your TRS-80. I run the Nikon Scan 3 software separately from PhotoShop 7 so that I can run one while working with the other. Otherwise while it's scanning, it will lock up your PS from use. It comes with a myriad of trays which work generally quite well but it cannot handle stack loaders. This is strictly a one strip at a time scanner. After all, these are some serious file sizes. While expensive, the 8000ED is approaching the quality of a drum scanner without the mess and the expense. For most work this is truly going to deliver.

Rating:
Summary: Nikon's Medium Format Film Scanner--the 8000ED
Review: If you have both 35mm and medium format transparencies and or negatives to bring into the digital age, I heartily recommend the Nikon Super Coolscan 8000ED. Firewire equipped, it is designed to work easily with the current line of graphics capable computers. Its bundled software has worked well for me (using a MAC with OSX and Firewire) and features three special capabilities. (1) Digital ICE3 will gently remove scratches and dust saving you hours of retouching (it doesn't work well with Kodachrome and black and white silver based emulsions). (2) ROC will restore colors to faded slides. It really works! (3) GEM gives you the ability to affect grain appearance. For the highest resolution imaging (4000DPI) the process takes some time. You also need to make sure that you have a fairly up to date computer. Some serious computing is going on here and with file sizes in the hundreds of Megabytes, you can't run this with your TRS-80. I run the Nikon Scan 3 software separately from PhotoShop 7 so that I can run one while working with the other. Otherwise while it's scanning, it will lock up your PS from use. It comes with a myriad of trays which work generally quite well but it cannot handle stack loaders. This is strictly a one strip at a time scanner. After all, these are some serious file sizes. While expensive, the 8000ED is approaching the quality of a drum scanner without the mess and the expense. For most work this is truly going to deliver.