First report on Slide Scanning
Well, I now have a Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 ED, without the automatic-slide-feeding adapter. I couldn’t see paying another $400 for what’s been described as “a piece of plastic that you have to watch all the time.” I might as well feed the things in myself, if I have to be here anyway.
So, here’s an edited1 version of the first one:
No special reason for this to be first, it was just the one I grabbed out of the box of our Europe slides.
For what I intend to do with this project, I’m very pleased with the quality of the scan (I’m not a professional, and I don’t expect to be making posters). You can do a lot of picture processing from within the scanning software (and the dust-and-scratch-removing Digital ICE works a treat), but I prefer to do such things in Photoshop. Probably just a familiarity bias.
It doesn’t take a huge amount of time to scan a slide, especially if you don’t play around a lot with previews ;). I haven’t done enough to get an “average” feeling, though many people say they spend about 5 minutes each. The actual scan time for me hasn’t been that long — perhaps they’re including post-processing time?
There are two downsides with this scanner: 1) It is noisy. I thought I was going to have to send it back, but apparently the sound is normal for this unit. Another reason to not get the auto-feeder and set it to run all night. 2) The software is old. Clunky-looking, and apparently not able to work natively on an Intel-based Mac because they haven’t updated it since 2004.2 Luckily, I’ve got a G5 iMac (one of the last), so I’m not having a problem running the software (knock wood). One thing I’ve been warned about is to not do anything else on the computer while the scanner is acquiring the image. I’ll report back later if that’s an issue.
All in all, I’m pretty psyched about this project. I ran out of CDs to re-rip ;), so I need one of those mindless listening-to-a-book tasks to do for the upcoming winter.
- In Photoshop: auto-levels, reduced resolution and size, save as 80% quality jpg.↩
- This is one of those niche products that nobody is doing a good job at updating, because they think they’ve saturated the market already. If they’d bother to make a decent modern scanner and good software, they’d probably increase the market substantially. Slides are the last of the consumer-produced media that needs digitization. Hell, you can buy a digitizing turntable for less than 100 bucks.↩
