Nikon Coolscan V ED, 4000 dpi, 35mm, Film Scanner

Comments about Nikon Coolscan V ED Film Scanner:

Works great on windows and mac.
Good software, nice price.

Comments about Nikon Coolscan V ED Film Scanner:

This product is aptly named, 'Coolscan'. It is THE coolest. We just purchased this puppy and are beginning to digitize our old 35mm slides. It has been a couple of decades since we even looked at some of these images, so this is like revisiting dear old friends. I am amazed that the color in our slides, some of which go back 30 years, has not deteriorated. The Coolscan V ED Film Scanner is simple to use and the results are fun. I am beginning to send jpegs of some of the digitized images to our family members and friends. Due to the thousands of slides we have in our archives, not to mention tons of negatives, this will be an ongoing project for some time to come, but the results will be well worth the effort. Don't hesitate to buy this fine NIKON product.

Comments about Nikon Coolscan V ED Film Scanner:

Have scanned a couple of hundred slides so far and have been very pleased with the quality results using VueScan's scanning software (not included).

The only possible negative that I can think of is that it is a touch slow but considering it's doing 4k scans it is very acceptable. Once you get into a rhythm it's just fine. For the price, this is a wonderful piece of precision equipment and I am very pleased with the results.

Comments about Nikon Coolscan V ED Film Scanner:

The product is easy to handle. The scanner and Nikon Scan 4 work perfectly and are powerful.

Comments about Nikon Coolscan V ED Film Scanner:

I have over 2,000 slides I took about 35 years ago in Japan.
This will let me review and preserve each of these for my children to enjoy. The NIKON software is really terrific. Pictures that were originally dark and hard to see, were brought to life for the 1st time. I have used the scanner on by my Ubuntu (Linux) system and a Microsoft XP system. Scanner works with either OS.

Comments about Nikon Coolscan V ED Film Scanner:

I've been using this scanner for ~ 1 month at this point, have really enjoyed its use and output. Software works well in OSX Leopard. Scans are ~ 2 and 1/2 minutes with ICE, autofocus, and autoexposure on my Intel Macbook. This feels perhaps a little sluggish. ICE is very effective, and this scanner captures good shadow detail. With regard to resolution, it appears to outresolve the medium and high speed films I use -- this is a noticeable improvement over the newer flatbed scanners i've tried. Scans are quite large wrt file size, and I think I may have to invest in a larger drive at some point.
I'm beginning to look at my lenses a little closer with this scanner's higher resolution and to reevaluate them which is interesting.
Overall a very positive experience, look forward to making many enlargements from my pile of negs.

Comments about Nikon Coolscan V ED Film Scanner:

I have 20 years of negatives and slides that I need to catalog and save from ruin. This is my winter project. I will also be scanning my 50yr collection of family slides. The scanner performs beautifully in scanning for a 300dpi photo and allows me to work in Adobe Elements for editing. What's not so great about it is that some scans take a little longer than others, but when going for perfection, I'll take the wait!

Comments about Nikon Coolscan V ED Film Scanner:

No issues whatsoever scanning photos though it did take some time to find the right settings to ensure that previews were sufficiently fast and scans accurate.

Comments about Nikon Coolscan V ED Film Scanner:

I have begun to digitally archive the photos of the past before my negatives become destroyed by time.

Service and delivery comments:

Prompt delivery. B&H always comes through.

Comments about Nikon Coolscan V ED Film Scanner:

I am very satisfied with the performance of the scanner. I have scanned approximately 100 Kodachrome slides my father took in the 50's and 60's. Digital ICE works very well in removing dust scratches and fingerprints. Contrary to some previous reviews I have read, the software has been very stable on my Windows XP PC.

Comments about Nikon Coolscan V ED Film Scanner:

been trying it out for the last week and am surprisingly pleased with the results. was expecting the nikon software to be really bad but have found it very useable and not buggy at all like others have said. i'm glad i've stuck with shooting film and never made the move to digital.

Comments about Nikon Coolscan V ED Film Scanner:

The results are better then pure digital.-Fine grain chromes+proper exposure=almost med. format results!

Comments about Nikon Coolscan V ED Film Scanner:

The Coolscan V ED has fantastic image quality overall, and the Digital ICE 4 dust removal is peerless. The software is easy to use and feature-rich, however it seems to crash periodically, making large batch operations a little clumsy.

However, the 4000dpi resolution and color correction makes up for this in small batches, and the scanner performs admirably for it's conservative price.

Loading film strips and slides is quick and easy, and so far I haven't had any complaints about its operation. When scanning night photography, the color will need to be corrected significantly for "greening", but the software makes this a snap. Plus, the other Digital ICE functions make for very interesting "tweaks" in the exposure.

If you're looking for something to perform large batch scanning operations of 100 items or more, this isn't your scanner. However if you're periodically scanning a couple rolls worth a of film, this is a high-quality option for a low price.

Comments about Nikon Coolscan V ED Film Scanner:

This scanner is great. When my father passed away, I discovered about 400 slides at his house, many that I had never seen. Most of these were shot in the late 50’s and early 60’s. I also have about 1,000 slides that I shot in the early 80’s. It’s been 20 years since I’ve dragged out the projector and screen. Looking at slides was just a pain in the neck.

Now, with the Nikon Scanner, all that has changed. I have about half the slides scanned and can just view or print them with my computer. Time to put the projector up for sale.

The scanner is easy to use. The software can be as complicated or as easy to use as you want it to be. You could spend 30 minutes tweaking each slide to perfection. But I would think if you were that much of a perfectionist, you would already have Photoshop and you would work with each picture there.

I prefer to just scan each slide and move on to the next…it is what it is. I’m scanning family pictures, not potential magazine covers. There were a few I will go back and work on a little with Photoshop, but any corrections needed are because of the photography, not the scanner.

The old cardboard-framed slides need to be wiped with a micro fiber cloth to clean the dust off. The newer plastic-framed slides needed no cleaning.

I have not used the film-strip adapter yet.

Slow? Yes, a little. Set yourself up by the TV, or have a good book to read. Also, you can still use your computer for other things while you are scanning.

Comments about Nikon Coolscan V ED Film Scanner:

Scanned 1000 Kodachrome so far. The faster you PC is, the faster you get results soon i.e. ICE4 treatment is hardware but all others are software postprocessing hence it should have been great that Nikon provides a batch processing instead of individual processing when scan a view.

On Win XP Pro (nikon 4.0.2), application may crash but not so often (3 times on 17 nights scanning).
On Vista Premium (nikon 4.0.3) works fine but it's not posible to create folder during the scan procedure, you have to make it first. On Win Xp it's possible.

I set it to get same quality as my digital camera (Canon 300D). Very good results by setting : 6MPix (180dpi) Kodachrome + ICE4 ON + ROC + DDE even if a bit longer (1min on my Vista PC).
DDE really improve dark slides.

I'm french and it's cheaper to buy it in USA, import and pay french VAT than buying in France !!!

Very good product, I will try soon to scan negatives.

Comments about Nikon Coolscan V ED Film Scanner:

The output looks great, and the ICE feature (infra-red cleaning) does a great job of removing dust and scratches. You have full control over all the details of the scans: positions on the negatives, exposure, gamma, color-correction, etc. But the NikonScan 4 software, when previewing strips of film, often wrongly reports that there's no film present. It does this with two different scanners on two different computers, so it's a software-bug and not some other problem. Except for this software flakiness, I'd recommend this scanner for anybody. Consider using the Vuescan software instead.

Comments about Nikon Coolscan V ED Film Scanner:

I am going to use the scanner to archive about 6,000 slides going back 50 years.

I'm just getting started, but, using PS Elements 4, I have gotten some good results on slides from 1967. Maybe when I get some time to study the Nikon software some more, I'll get better results without going thru PS Elements.

No stacker is available. Slides must be fed one at a time

Comments about Nikon Coolscan V ED Film Scanner:

This product works great. I' impressed with the quality of the scans. Works great with slide nd color negs. I have not tried b&w negs yet, but it is on my list. It is a bit slow but not too bad. I have used it with the silverfast demo software and did not think it scaned that much faster but I do like being able to perform multi-scans with the silverfast ( it is not able to do so with the nikon software). I will buy the silverfast for that reason.

Comments about Nikon Coolscan V ED Film Scanner:

By purchasing it, I have solved two problems:

First, I do not need to buy a new digital SLR camera to replace my old one and still enjoy the advantage of the digital image technology.

Second, I can edit many pictures which I took in the past years when there was no such a thing of digital picture. Specially the B&W ones. I used to pay more to recover them.

Comments about Nikon Coolscan V ED Film Scanner:

I bought the scanner to scan family snapshots and slides. I have higher-end artistic items as well, but this was not my focus. The scanner performs well with both. I tend to use the Digital ICE, but save the other processing to be done in software later. GEM is nice, but adds a lot of time to the scans. Noise Ninja works just as well and can be done later. Since standard consumer grade negatives have a ton of grain, GEM or Noise Ninja is often needed.

The scanner is slow, but good for the money. (Like models are also slow)

The included software is marginal. It has not been updated since 2004. Although I read a lot of horror stories, it has worked fine with my Intel MacBook running Mac OS 10.5. I'd prefer to use VueScan, but got much worse results. With VueScan, Kodachrome slides had a blueish color cast and negatives were washed out. I may have been happy with VueScan had I not seen the Nikon Scan versions side by side. Tech support from VueScan just advised me to re-read the manual a few times. That obviously didn't help. I tried with all different options and read a lot of user advise on the internet, but finally punted on VueScan.

The fact that the Nikon Scan software is so old and outdated makes me very nervous about the product, but so far it is working OK.