My Dad, brother, and I went in for a Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 ED, a film scanner. It handles slides, 35mm, and (with the adapter we forked out another $130 for) APS film. The plan is for Scott & I to scan in all our film prints, and then off it goes to Dad where he’ll spend quite some time scanning in all his film — mostly slides.

So far, I’m happy with the scanner, and less thrilled with the scanning software.

First off, a comparison. The scanner comes with this Digital ICE4 technology that essentially “fixes” errors on 35mm negatives. Here’s an example from the first batch of negatives I did. These were black & whites taken by a friend of ours on our wedding with a good camera:

(raw scan)

(with Digital ICE4)

Notice a lot of the dust (white specs) are gone. Also, check out the shoes in the upper right corner. Notice anything? Yup, the minor bit of hair is gone — magically imaged out. Sweet!

So far, I’ve done one roll of APS film and one set of B&W negatives. Initial thoughts:

• If you just scan files in, they’re big. The B&Ws were 60M each. Yow! Well, you do get 4000 DPI for your 60M, which if I did my math correctly is equivalent to a 20 megapixel camera. The APS (color negs) were 38M each. But hey, that’s why they invented 300G disk drives, right? (to save you the math, at 60M / image, 300G gives you 5000 60M images).
• Scanning isn’t just mounting the film and pressing scan. You have to crop the picture (there’s a white border around APS film, and a white / black border around 35mm — the black is between each frame, and the white is on either side). I need to see about ImageMagick’s convert which has an auto-crop as well.
• You also have to rotate the pics… on APS, I had to rotate every frickin’ one as for some reason, the scanner is aligned 90′ counter-clockwise. This means most of your portrait pics are upside-down and most of your normal pics need to be rotated. Blah.
• For each scan, you have to click the DigitalICE thing. Blah. Doesn’t seem to be a way to have default settings (at least for that feature).
• Scanning takes a bit. However, it’s not too bad on your CPU (I’m still on my dual 600Mhz, and it only seems to suck up half the CPU while scanning which is nice).
• APS is super cake.. you just dump the film cannister in, and everything gets scanned. Even though the film is something like 24mm vs 32mm, scanning is just so much easier. Although I haven’t seen how the slide feeder works yet.

Welp, more later… let’s see how long it takes to crank through the ol’ wedding photo album!