Customer Reviews

Nikon CoolScan V LS-50 ED Film Scanner

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(27)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

The Coolscan V is an excellent cheaper alternative to the Coolscan 5000 which I have also owned. My immediate project included about 1500 slides from my own collection, my fathers collection, and my grandfather's collection.

Most of my father's slides are Kodachrome. Much has been written about the inability of this scanner to scan Kodachrome slides and said about ICE4 not working with Kodachrome. Well, I have some good news The ICE4 does work extremely well for the most part. However, with Kodachrome slides it does produce minor artifacts in about 5 percent of the slides. I scanned with ICE (not ICE4) always on and then rescanned if I encountered unacceptable artifacts. I did notice that the scanner ICE feature was more likely to be stumped by old Kodachrome slides where subjects were wearing shirts with stripes.

The GEM ROC and DEE (the other stalwarts of the ICE4 other than ICE itself) work on Kodachrome slides as well, but I found that the results were unpredictable and that I could achieve better results myself in Photoshop far more quickly. The GEM ROC and DEE features simply took too long and slowed down the scanning unacceptably. The results, for me, were not worth the additional scanning time. So I never used these features. But the "enhance" feature on the scanner I used nearly 100% of the time with great results - much better than the GEM ROC and DEE features.

The scanner is fast and does produce wonderful wonderful detailed scans, easily demonstrating the grain in the transparancies at 3000 and 4000 dpi. The Kodachrome slides were a challenge to the Dynamic Range of the scanner, but I believe that most of the detail in the shadows that is there was extracted. With dark slides I used the VERY useful gain feature turning it all the way up to 2 in the really dark slides. Unfortunately, Kodachrome, with all of its many attributes, does have substantial downsides including a very narrow exposure latitude and shadow detail is simply lacking. I think the scanner accurately reproduced the information including the colors on the Kodachrome slides, with perhaps a slight bluish cast noticed in some cases.

It wasn't until I was finished scanning all of the culled slides that I undertook to scan my select color negatives. And this scanner really came into its own scanning color negatives. Don't even TRY to scan color negatives without ICE because the results are unbelievably bad. Even pristine negatives have scratches and dust that magically are erased by the ICE feature. What a godsend. The scanned color negatives were just beautiful with very accurate color rendition. But immediately I noticed much more grain in the color negatives (Royal Gold and Fuji Superia Gold) than in the scanned slides.

One note unrelated to the scanner itself. Until you've used a digital scanner to scan your color negatives you can't begin to realize how far superior Kodachrome, Provia, and Ektachrome slides are to color negatives insofar as capturing detail. Even the best color negatives have much more grain that Kodachrome. And the difference in color negatives is substantial too.

The V was slower than the 5000, but honestly the difference for the non-professional scanner, to me, was not worth the additional investment. The V represents a superb value giving you nearly all of the advantages of the 5000 other than speed for a substantially cheaper price.

The included Nikon software worked fantastic for me. I downloaded a copy of VueScan which according to many reviews is superior to the Nikon software and found that for me the Nikon software was easier to work with and produced superior results.

Setup Summary: I scanned at a 16 bit color depth and 4000 pixels per inch with the scan enhancer turned on and the Digital ICE turned on. I did not use GEM ROC and DEE because of inconsistent results. I turned up the gain as necessary for dark slides and turned it down for light slides. Gain adjustments were only necessary on about 15 - 20% of the slides.

Setting up the Nikon Scan window was a little tricky too. I placed the tool palette in the far upper right corner of the window with the scan window placed under it to the right. The image window occupied the largest portion space to the left.

I can recommend this scanner without reservation. It is a phenomenal piece of equipment. If speed is not a paramount consideration and you are not a professional scanner needing the options (the auto feeder) offered by the 5000 then, in my opinion, the V represents an absolutely tremendous value.

Having worked with professional drum scanners (Hell Graphic Systems), I know a little about scanning. This Nikon Coolscan V ED is the first personal scanner I have worked with and am pleasantly surprised. I have inhereted the old familly slide collection and several of the slides are grossly underexposed, or darkened with age. The V ED has the sensitivity to pull out more image than I had hoped for, with very little noise. The provided software is no replacement for Photoshop, but can go a long ways to giving acceptable results without other image retouching software. I am eager to see SilverFast for the V ED however!

The only problems I've encountered is unexpected termination of the program, and mis-judging frame boundaries of negative strips. Negative scanning is a snap, an unexpected pleasure as thinking color in reverse is painful (on German drum scanners).

For the price, this is a very highly capable scanner worthy of your consideration. If your scan rate needs are high, consider the faster version, and a FAST G5 Macintosh. A 1.25 GHz G4 gets a workout on the tougher scans.

Decade's collection of fading film this COOLSCAN can handle. You can obtain detailed images that are truly vivid, sharp, and better than the original then technology. Just remember to use DEE correctly. Read below for further details on DEE.

Batch scanning can be done with one click on the Scan button in Nikon Scan 4's firmware. The maintenance free red, green, blue, and infrared LED light source is gentle to film. The 4000 ppi optical resolution is an ideal start for outputting A3+ prints on the new crop of large format bubblejet and inkjet printers.

Reading the Nikon Scan Reference Manual in the Nikon Scan Reference Manual/Easy Scanning Guide CD would be your best learning tool to get the most out of your scanner. For the most accurate results, the first thing to do before scanning is to set your preferences by clicking on the Prefs button in the Control Area of the Scan Window.

When enabled, the Digital ICE quad Advanced software works well with most film. The Manual will explain that ICE, ROC, GEM, and DEE will not operate with the optional FH-G1 Medical Holder.

ICE will not work on monochrome film unless the film has been developed in colour. ICE will not work properly on Kodachrome, but will work on other brands of slides. Noise may appear if ICE is used on overexposed or very vivid images. ICE will reduce the overall sharpness of the image. ICE is not not designed nor does ICE advertise itself to remove all dust and scratches from film. ICE will reduce most of the dust and scatches, however. You will have to use a third party application like Adobe Photoshop to remove the remaining dust and scratches. ICE alone will double the scanning time of 38 seconds.

ROC may add colour to monochrome or grayscale images. ROC is not necessary for properly exposed colour images. ROC alone will almost double the scanning time.

GEM will remove most grain and soften the image. Best to just use the default setting of 3 for a balanced smooth-grained result and to elimate any annoying hot pixels provided you haven't oversharpened or overused DEE. GEM alone will almost triple the scanning time.

DEE works best when the image is cropped to exclude other unexposed areas of the film. Don't get me wrong, DEE does work beautifully! If Unsharp Mask (UM) is used incorrectly prior to processing the image, DEE will mainly show hot pixels in mid-tones and shadow areas effectively ruining the print. To avoid hot pixels in most photographs, either sparingly set the UM in Nikon Scan to less than 25% Intensity/25% Halo Width/0 Threshold Level or set the UM in Photoshop to about 125% Amount/1.5 Radius/1 to 3 Threshold. Depending on the image, using the default setting of 50 on DEE and adjusting the highlight lever from 190 to 255 will produce smooth and pleasing tones. Turning DEE off and using Photoshop CS's Shadow/Highlight tool sparingly on the processed image in LAB Lightness provides similar manual control of shadows and highlights. Also, remember to set the resolution output to your printer by clicking on the Custom button and select your printer in the Crop Menu. Also it's usually better to crop the image to the desired output dimensions to ensure 100% coverage (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) on your bordered prints. DEE alone will almost quadruple the scanning time.

When enabled, Scan Image Enhancer (SIE) will automatically adjust hue. It does not work with darker images. In fact, the scan produces darker images. You are better off using DEE to pull out hidden detail in the shaded areas.

ICE, ROC, GEM, DEE, and SIE together will almost quintuple the scanning time. While waiting for the breathtaking results, you can spend the next few minutes to contemplate on the next advanced Nikon or Canon DSLR to buy to release you from ever having to scan 35mm film.

UM can be created to all colours, or individually to red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, or yellow colours in the image. Deselect blue if you do not want to emphasize the grain in an image with blue sky. Remember to use UM at the end before scanning the negative to output the final image.

The SA-21 strip-film adaptor only works for 2 - 6 frames. To save money by not having to buy the optional 1 - 6 frame FH-3 film holder, place a 1 frame negative into an empty cardboard slide holder and insert into the MA-21 slide holder. Remember to select Neg (color), and Calibrated RGB in the Control Area before scanning.

Along with a short USB 2.0 cable, included in the package is a Nikon View 6 CD, which is an application, used to organize saved pictures in TIFF and JPEG file formats only. According to the Manual, large files created in Nikon Scan may not show on Nikon View slide shows.

Before clicking on the Scan button, press Ctrl (MS Windows) and the Autofocus button. Then left click on a focal point in the preview image to ensure accurate focusing at that point. You can always change the focus point using the same method, or by using the Focus Tool in the Layout Tools palette. The palette can also be customized to suit.

If you have to use the Analog Gain palette to correct or adjust the colour values for each of the elements in the scanner's light source, your LED's may require repair. The probability of repair to the LED's is not specifically discussed in the Manual.

If desktop or cubbyhole space is an issue, the scanner can be placed with either the top or side vents facing up. Remember to provide the minimum clearances to the scanner for ventilation. The dual wrap around band of rubber feet will ensure a cushioned slip resistant footing.

After processing the image and for most situations for the various film brands, Photoshop gives you better fine-tuning control of the scanned image because of their larger selection of imaging enhancing Tools.

Compared to filmstrip scanners that come with flatbed scanners, COOLSCAN has more options and is by far the better equipment to use to obtain satisfying scans, especially at 14-bit depth. Practice and patience will make perfect photographs.

I have a ton of negatives both black and white and color and simply scanning the prints wasn't always satisfactory. So I shopped around and found this particular scanner to be the best for under $1000. You can only scan 35 mm slides or negatives not medium format. The scanner has functions which cleans up dust and scratches, restores color, reduces grain among a number of functions but turning these functions on will prolong the amount of time it takes to scan the negative. However, the wait usually the longest being 5 minutes is highly satisfactory. The ED glass in the scanner and Nikon engineering has a lot to do about this. You have your choice of destination file types but generally given the very high resoluton you can have files up to 60 MB or more which I reduce to around 1-2 MB. The product was ready to use within minutes after installing the software and taking it out of the box. It's competitor Minolta Dimage IV was plagued by setup problems and also lacked the digital clean up of negatives. If you have a box of 35 mm slides or negatives and want to archive them digitally or restore then I highly recommend this product.

Four words: This scanner is great!

What makes it great is the combination of Digital ICE and Digital ROC.

1. I've used a film/slide scanner without digital ICE and for each slide I scanned, I would need to spend 1/2 to 1 hour manually removing dust spots. The Digital ICE built-in to the scanner driver is fantastic. I never see dust spots anymore and the scan is as sharp as ever.

2. Digital ROC (Restoration of Color) is fantastic. I have scanned ancient slides from the early 60's through the mid-80's and the Digital ROC compensates for the fading color in an amazing, adaptive way. I don't know how it does it, but it works!

Finally, when I first bought this scanner, I wondered if the fact that there isn't a slide carrier that allowed batch scanning of slides would cause a problem. It turns out that the opposite is true. I have found that it takes more time to position a slide in a carrier and then feed the carrier into a scanner (the way I used to do it) than to simply slip a single slide into the slide reciever that comes standard with this scanner. Even factoring in scanning multiple slides, I prefer this scanner to one that uses a multiple slide carrier.

I have noted some quirks with the software: All occur when batch-scanning color negatives (scanning multiple images on the same filmstrip). However, if I manually "preview" each frame and then setup the crop and scan parameters for each frame the scanner software works great and I can walk away while the scanner does its thing on several images, unattended.

This scanner is fantatic. I highly recommend it.

BOTTOM LINE: If you are not familiar with Photoshop tools and aren't ready for a user experience that frustrates a professional and burns out amateurs, I'd steer clear for now. If you know your way around and have patience, you will get very satisfying results from this machine.

I am told the Macintosh version of Nikon's scan software is pretty good. The Windows version of the utility however, is ALMOST the worst interface I have ever used. Why does this matter? I found VueScan and SilverFast to be lacking in their implementations of "Digital ICE" so I stuck to the awful Nikon interface for that reason alone. If you don't need ICE, these are both great alternatives to Nikon Scan. If you use Nikon Scan, you will be frustrated and thwarted by it.

I won't go into too many details because there are so many complaints already circulating the net, but this is a crash-happy unintuitive user-defeating piece of software. What's more, and you should love this-- it says right there in the manuals NIKON SCAN IS NOT COMPATIBLE WITH PHOTOSHOP. Go figure.

Settings aren't sticky, controls aren't sensibly located, and the interface obscures the tools. Too many simple changes cause the scanner to restart the prescan process, and that can be as time consuming as an actual scan. Closing the wrong window at the wrong time crashes any open documents and kills scans still floating in RAM without warning dialogs.

I find myself taking up to 30 minutes per scan at times with this scanner when the frustration slider is set to max. Best times are around 4 minutes for slides in good condition.

Remember this scanner only scans standard 35mm slides and negatives, and only one at a time. Batch process at most can handle six-frame cut strip negatives, and you can purchase an external slide feeder designed for another model, but I have never tried. Scanning uncut strip negatives is not recommended, but if you must you can disassemble the scanner to allow feed-thru.

The scanner can be rigged to use an adapter made for a different Nikon model if unusual 35mm strip film is encountered (IE Kodak Safety Film), but the results are unpredictable and dangerous to the film because of the way you have to fool around with it. I have found the film shifts around in the holder or the frames are often cropped at top and bottom.

As of May 2006, an Epson V700 has finally bested my Nikon Coolscan V. Never thought I'd see a flatbed scanner with dead-on focus and resolution capable of rendering 35mm transparencies and negatives properly, or beating out a dedicated slide scanner, but this thing actually came through. Not only that but it has higher resolution, IF you have sharp enough film. Anyway that's another review. The Nikon still wins in scanning severely underexposed film, and handles Kodachrome a bit better, but both by a small margin. It definitely loses now for its strict limitation to standard 35mm. Consider the V700 as an option if you're not sure about this purchase.

The claim made by Nikon regarding the speed of the Coolscan V ED scanner (14 sec for preview and 38 sec for scanning) is just a sales pitch. It takes the scanner nealy five minutes to preview and scan a slide at 2400 dpi with functions such as ICE and DEE on. The end product is a well-exposed image and the Image Correction Enhancement (ICE) works wonders in cleaning the tiny particles which cannot be brushed off even with a $ 25 static free brush. As a comparison my 6 year old Epson 1240 U flatbed scanner will scan at the same resolution in two minutes but it lacks features such as ICE and DEE.
The Nikon Scan 4 software is problematic. It does not work through Photoshop even though Nikon recommends to install their Nikon Scan plug-in file in the application's plug-ins folder. I tried this and my computer had the tendency to freeze. Something which did not happen during the two years since I have been using my Mac G-5 machine. When I called the Nikon technical help support I was told Nikon is aware of the problem and they recommended that I launch the scanner through the Nikon software only. Their software works fine most of the time but will not respond from time to time and the only way to quit the program is to force quit the application. This of course is problematic to say the least. Nikon said at this time they do not have any update to resolve the problem.
So I have to scan the slide, then open the file in Photoshop and crop and enhance it. This means spending more time in processing a slide.
Other than this the scanner works like a charm, focusing is sharp and its optics are great. The machine is quite noisy though. It is an excellent machine but Nikon definitely needs to improve the software. Given the quality of the scanned slides the Coolscan V ED is well worth the price of $ 547 including shipping.

I've had this scanner for 6 months, and am very impressed with the results. Before this, dealing with dust, scratches and the like was a real pain, but with ICE I hardly need to bother looking for blemishes in scans. And DEE is able to pull detail from seemingly hopelessly underexposed parts of a slide. GEM is slow, but good when every last detail counts (for large enlargements). The resolution is wonderful, still better than any digital camera I know of. With this scanner and a bit of digital artistry I've been able to resurrect photos from the dead. I am fully satisfied; the only thing more I could ask for is speed, but not at this price. A great way to retrieve those prized photos for digital archival and I'm still sticking with this scanner and a film camera for pictures I take now.

I got the Nikon CoolScan V 2 months ago. My aim is to be able to digitize all 15 years worth of films and store the pictures in my digital picture library that I started when I moved to Digital Photography.
I have digitized so far about 1500 pictures with no problems at all.
I strongly recommend practicing on a few negatives and adjusting the various controls that are inbuilt in the software.
1-The ICE feature is key whether used on fine or Normal, it will enhance the picture by getting rid of all the imperfections found on the negative.
2- Brightness level is a control that will be used depending on the exposure quality of the original negative.
3-The color balance can also be used to adjust some lighting conditions and can dramatically improve the quality of the picture.
4- Other functions are also very useful and can enhance the picture quality.

The scanner operation is very silent and its setup was very easy. Just remember, drivers first then plug the scanner ( like most USB devices).

As for the scanning speed, it varies depending on the image processing applied.With ICE being a minimum requirment previewing, cropping and scanning of 4 shots can take up to 10mn.

The storage requirement is another parameter that needs to be set. Because of the shear amount of pictures that I have I chose high compression which results in 1.0Mb pictures for every negative. Left alone the size could go up to 16Mb for the raw data. This is too much in storage!!!!

I am about a quarter of the way to the finish but I can now enjoy my old pictures instantly thanks to Nikon CoolScan V.

This is an excellent slide scanner and does exactly what it is supposed to do very well. Yes, it is somewhat slow, but only in comparison to regular flatbed scanners. I have the slides scan at maximum resolution, but have the final image resized to about 20%. This keeps the file size manageable (about 5 MB per scan) and still provides an image that fills the screen. With the digital corrections on (which does make a huge difference on old family slides), and some minor post-processing, it has been taking about a minute per slide.

As for the software, while it can be very complicated, most of the settings are fine in the default mode, and I would say the learning curve to get started is minimal. Yes, you can spend hours and hours learning all the histograms and curves and other manipulation features, but unless you're a professional, there's really no need to mess with all that.

So all in all, I think this is a great scanner and it is providing me with digital captures of my family's 30 year old slides that otherwise would have remained unviewed in their vintage carousels.