Customer Reviews
I wish I bought this sooner 
2008-06-25
Great photo scanner. My 35mm photos are now full of details and look alive. I decided to purchase the Nikon scanner because of the awful quality of the prints I got from several different photo shops. I've uploaded an example of a before/after of a photo of a raccoon here at Amazon. The photo itself is nothing spectacular. A raccoon came on my back porch one night and I quickly took two photos of it before it ran away. When the photos were processed they were really horrible. See the side by side comparison. The difference is unreal.
I work with a Mac and I haven't experienced any problems with the scanner. The only thing I could say is do not make any changes to the scans with the Nikon software once the photos were scanned with the settings you initially chose to scan with. If you make any "post" changes, it'll take forever to save. Just save the scan as is and tweak the photos (if they need tweaking) in Photoshop.
Even though I have two digital cameras, I'll keep taking photos with my many 35mm cameras thanks to this fantastic scanner.
Excellent Scanner to Convert Your Collection 2008-06-20
I purchased this scanner to digitize my color negatives with the intention of selling it when finished. Set up was easy. Results are good to excellent depending on negative condition. I leave ICE and scan image enhancer on all the time and the result is pretty good. Scan time is about 10 minutes per 4 pic negative with setting at medium. Average file size for jpeg is about 3.5MB. It wont work miracles, but it does a pretty good job on negatives that are were in storage for years. If I can resell it while retaining 75% of what I paid for it, then it will be well worth the effort. It's a slow slow process.. If you have thousands of slides or negatives I would suggest a faster unit. If you have a few thousand or less, then this is ideal... I give it a 5 star because it does exactly what it was designed to do with good to excellent results.. On occasion with ICE on you will get a miracle out of it.. turning a very damaged negative into a pretty nice image.
Excellant 2008-06-18
This scanner is what I was looking for. I tried using cheaper film scanners and adapters on bed scanners. Always disappointed with noise and resolution. I will be archiving my Dads slide collection (almost 5000 slides) and then my print film (edited down to maybe 3000). This scanner picked out amazing detail without tweaking any settings. It made me feel like I was laying on the floor watching those slides with a projector again. Yes it makes some noise, but tolerable. Scan speed is slowed when ICE , ROC and GEM are enabled at 4100 dpi, but I didn't think it was much longer than my old Prime Film 1800U.
Attention Mac Users 
2008-05-18
This is a great product. Robust, well built & fast enough for the occasional slide & negative film scanner like I am. From time to time I still prefer my Nikon F100 film camera over the newer digital D300. Scanning high quality professional slide & film material easily renders about 22mpix images without noise or grain. Excellent!
Just be aware that the latest Nikon Scan software is still PowerPC and not Universal. You'll notice minor speed issues when working with extremely large images, even with 4GB of ram. I use a 24" iMac.
The software sometime looses it's USB connection to the scanner (I am guessing: about once per 50 slides)
I think these glitches will be fixed with any future software releases, although Nikon is a bit slow in this field.
After all, I am happy with the scanner and I think it was money well spent. Now I have some of the slides I took 10 years ago in Aperture and am post-processing them just as any other RAW/NEF file.
One more thing: The NikonScan RAW (.NEF) format is not compatible with MacOS X 10.5.2 at this point. You'll have to use 14 bit tiff as a second option. Beware: HUGE FILES... about 140 MB each! What I do is scan TIFFS, post-process and save 8 bit tiffs so I save about 1/2 HD space.
Cheers!
Nice scans but software is slow 2008-05-02
I am very pleased with the scanner from a hardware perspective and quality of the scans but the software is very clunky and has not been updated for several years for Mac OS X. While it does function, it crashes often and is very slow on my dual G5 tower.
I'll never use a flat-bed scanner again 2008-07-05
Until now I've been scanning with a flat-bed. I cannot believe how much better the images look coming out of the Coolscan. Someday I may upgrade to a Coolscan 9000, but I will never bother with a flatbed again. And Digital GEM is excellent at removing grain.
My only real gripe is that there is no way to scan an entire roll at a time.
A good way to change slides to digital 2008-07-03
I am pleased with the Nikon Coolscan. It is a good way to turn my slides to digital and it also gives me the opportunity to adjust any colors that have been lost over the years. Good job.
Great with color, Good with Black and White 2008-07-02
It's not fast, but the quality and ease of scanning color slides and negatives is very good and the results are just spectacular. It's very good at getting a good quality scan from less than great slides and negatives. There are a few negatives, though not enough to make me regret my purchase.
1) Inadequate documentation (John Shaw's scanning article online was very helpful)
2) Most of the special scanning features (DEE, ICE, GEM) don't work with Black and white and you have to figure out how to create your own black and white settings so that you can just specify them once when scanning a negative strip or else you go crazy setting all the buttons and you get posterized black and white.
3)Without ICE in black and white (which doesn't work with the infrared tech they use) you have to have really clean negatives or spend a lot of time spotting. And even when you get good scans, it scans in color so you have to futz with color balance on every negative.
4) You have to cut the sprocket holes on the sides of the first negative so that there aren't any open sprocket holes or else it causes the scanner to error out and you have to open it up to get your negatives.
5) The software crashes occasionally (about 1-2 times per evening) on a modern Core 2 Duo iMac.
So though black and white is a problem, it's not negative enough to detract from a truly great piece of hardware.
a bit noisy but i am very happy 2008-07-01
When i first tried this scanner i was dismayed by the noises it made, but now after almost a years use and hundreds of negatives later, i am quite used to it. the quality of the scans and software is better than i had hoped for given that many of my negatives are inless than top condition given years of careless storage. it takes a while to do the scans especially if you use the software to its full capability to repair the damages and learning to do batch scanning with autosaving lets me do other things while it works. In the end the quality it produces is worth the wait, and now that i have grown used to its noises i can walk away and hear when its almost done and its time to change to a new set of negatives.
Great Product...Really Sloowww...But Worth It 2008-06-29
I bought this scanner really quite simply to scan all 600 of our wedding negatives as we have no digital version of our wedding pics. After you play with the settings a little, and get a bit of a system and momentum we have been able to scan a 5 pic negative in about 30-35 mins. This includes the initial scan to preview, changing the settings on each individual picture to where we want them, re-drawing, then scanning to file. We are scanning our stuff at 14 bits (higher resolution), Digital Ice Enabled (on Fine), Post Processing (Digital ROC, Digital GEM and Digital DEE) enabled and Post Processing enabled. With these settings, at this rate...it will take us 70 hours to do all 600 pics. The software really does an amazing job on the original pictures. Our wedding was shot in black and white, and the initial/preview scans look really grainy. After we get done modifying them, the grainy-ness is gone and the pictures are sooo clear. Much more detail is revealed than we had previously thought.
Since most of our pics over the last 7 years have been digital, we shouldn't have a need for the scanner after we're done with the wedding pics, and maybe a handful of other misc. rolls of film...so we think the time invested will provide us with a digital record of all our pictures and be well worth it.
If you have the time, this less expensive option is well worth it.
