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February 2006
David Em davidem@earthlink.net
www.davidem.com
Copyright 2006 David Em.
It's another sign of the death of film. Over the last few months it seems every person I know has asked me to recommend a painless method to digitize a lifetime collection of slides.
Regardless of whether you're a professional photographer who needs to archive your life's work or a civilian who wants to archive your family snapshots, what's required is a method that combines high quality, speed, ease-of-use, and affordability.
A few phone calls and a little research turned up a good candidate, Nikon's (www.nikon.com) $890 Super Coolscan 5000 ED, which has been on the market about a year.
The 5000 ED is a trim little desktop unit that scans 35mm and APS-size film. It comes with a slide mount adapter and a strip film adapter that can handle strips with between two and six frames. The two adapters are interchangeable. Nikon also sells some vastly overpriced optional accessories including a $450 50-slide bulk loader that has a reputation for jamming, and a $20 strip film holder.
The 5000 ED connects to Macs and PCs via USB 2. Setup was a snap, and the Nikon Scan 4 software loaded with no problems. You can access the software either as a standalone program or via the TWAIN interface in programs like Photoshop.
The software interface does the job, but as usual with Nikon, the implementation is a bit clunky. For example, scanned images appear behind the control window, requiring you to hunt for them. When instantiated within Photoshop, I wasn't able to access all the setup controls, requiring me to go back to the standalone version of the program and then restart Photoshop when I wanted to make changes.
Even using two monitors, I was constantly rearranging the work area. Some key features are hard to find, such as the scan resolution setting that for some reason lives at the bottom of the Crop menu. The capture software's not terribly memory-efficient, either. It usually seized up after a few good-sized 16-bit scans.
A few years ago, I tested Nikon's LS 1000 desktop scanner with disappointing results. They replaced it with the LS 2000, which was a vast improvement, providing good detail and color, especially with Ektachrome and negative films.
For a first pass with the 5000 ED, I scanned a Kodachrome slide using the default settings. This class of scanner generally has problems with Kodachrome, often skewing the colors into another dimension. I was pleased to see that the 5000 ED produced a very good result in approximately thirty seconds.
The 5000 ED employs a 16-bit A/D converter on the input side and 16-bit color for output. It uses a Nikkor ED lens (ED stands for Extra-low Dispersion) that produces excellent edge-to-edge sharpness. A highly precise LED light source starts right up (unlike fluorescent or halogen sources), and poses no potential heat-damage threat to the film.
When I tested Nikon's LS 2000 scanner a few years ago, I frequently had to use its multipass scanning capability to get a decent scan. The 5000 ED's hardware is quite an improvement. It can scan at 2X, 4X, 8X, and 16X, but I rarely had to resort multiple passes to get a good scan.
Once I had a good basic scan, I started tweaking. I set the capture resolution to the maximum 4,000 dpi and reset the per-color bit depth from 8-bit to 16-bit, which yielded appreciably better detail. Surprisingly, the extra bits added very little to the scan time, however the files, which I saved as losslessly compressed LZW TIFFs, averaged a hefty 140 megabytes apiece.
Next I scanned an Ektachrome slide originally shot in the Eighties that had shifted a little in color over the years. The contrast seemed off on the first pass, so I turned off the automatic color/contrast compensation switch. That delivered a better result.
Then I turned on the Digital ICE4 dust and scratch removal software. I've had mixed results over the years with ICE, which was developed some years ago by Applied Science Fiction (ASF). Previous versions softened the image unacceptably, but the ICE 4 implementation is vastly improved. It adds another half a minute to each image's scan time, but the equivalent work done by hand in Photoshop would take hours. Unfortunately, it only works with color films.
Nikon provides a related set of ASF correction tools called Digital ROC, Digital GEM, and Digital DEE. ROC restores faded colors, GEM reduces film grain, and DEE improves over- and under-exposed areas of an image (this is a really poor set of acronyms -- I can never remember what each one stands for). Turning on these features can add a couple minutes per scan.
Your mileage will vary with all these tools. Sometimes they have very little effect, and sometimes they actually make things worse. But other times they work the way they were intended to, and perform miracles. By making fine adjustments with them, I was able to pull some scans that had far better color, tone, and detail than what the raw scan produced.
Despite its somewhat clunky software interface and overpriced optional adapters, the Super Coolscan 5000 ED delivers very impressive results. Its $900 price tag may be a little steep in today's marketplace, but that's half what Nikon's earlier scanners cost, and the results are clearly superior.
Overall, the 5000 Ed's combination of high quality, rich color, and high speed make it a very good choice for both consumers and professionals who need to digitize their life's work. Recommended.