Product Description

Designed for use by imaging professionals, the SUPER COOLSCAN 5000 ED offers 135/IX240 film scanning at an amazing 20 seconds per image (including image transfer to display) - at 4, 000 dpi true optical resolution. Highly accurate color reproduction and representation of detail are made possible by the 16-bit A/D converter and 16-bit output channel.The SUPER COOLSCAN 5000 ED targets primarily business users such as professional photographers and photo finishers, who require superb image quality and high-speed scanning capability. Private users of 135/IX240 format cameras - advanced amateur SLR photographers, for example - will welcome the scanner's speed and image quality. Users who deal with numerous slide mounts and uncut film rolls will appreciate the increased ease of use and productivity afforded by optional accessories like the SLIDE FEEDER SF-210 and ROLL FILM ADAPTER SA-30. The SUPER COOLSCAN 5000 ED offers the performance and efficiency to make it the ideal digital archiving solution.With fast, easy image transfer thanks to the USB 2.0 interface, the SUPER COOLSCAN 5000 ED is an extremely powerful, extremely fast, extremely efficient desktop film scanner that will augment your productivity and give you scanned images that will take your breath away.

Product Details

• Brand: Nikon
• Model: 9238
• Released on: 2004-02-15
• Dimensions: 14.00 pounds

Features

• 4,000 dpi optical resolution, 4.8 density
• 16-bit A/D conversion, 8 or 16-bit output
• Preview scans in 11 seconds, full scans as fast as 20 seconds
• Digital ICE4 Advanced suite of image correction technologies
• USB interface, PC and Mac compatible

Amazon.com Product Description
Amazon.com Product Description A high-performance dedicated film scanner designed for imaging professionals, the Super Coolscan 5000 ED offers high-quality scanning of 35mm slides, 35mm film strips, APS film (with optional IX240 film adapter), and prepared slides (with optional medical slide holder). The Scanner-Nikkor ED glass lens offers a 4,000 dpi optical resolution, while the 3,964-pixel, two-line linear CCD image sensor and 16-bit per color A/D input (8-/16-bit output) provide true-to-life, brilliant results.

Nikon's own LED illumination technology ensures accurate color separation with no warm-up time or risk of heat damage. Scan times are as fast as 20 seconds including image transfer to display, and as fast as 11 seconds in preview mode. Automatic color/contrast compensation helps you achieve accurate results, while the ICE4 advanced digital image correction suite of technologies--including digital ICE, digital ROC, digital GEM, and digital DEE--helps to restore old slides to their original glory. Additionally, the included Nikon Scan 4 software provides a comprehensive and easy-to-use interface for managing your scans.

The Super Coolscan 5000 ED has a convenient, plug-and-play USB interface, while one-touch scan and preview buttons will have you scanning film in no time. PC and Mac compatible, the Super Coolscan 5000 ED also comes backed with a one-year limited warranty.

More Features:

Scan Image Enhancer		Nikkor ED glass lens
Scan Image Enhancer provides one-touch image correction. Automatic brightness and color saturation adjustments with no complicated control settings make it easy to produce images with optimal contrast.		Scanner Nikkor ED glass lens greatly reduces chromatic aberration and image distortion, and delivers sharp images.

What's in the Box
Scanner, power cord, USB cable, MA-21 slide mount adapter, SA-21 strip film adapter, software CD-ROM (Nikonview, Nikon Scan 4), Nikon User's Guide, one-year Nikon U.S.A. limited warranty information

Customer Reviews

An outstanding scanner and a pleasure to use!
First of all, let me say I am a neophyte when it comes to scanning. My mother passed away recently and I wanted to go through my father's 20,000 slides and scan the best ones before they, as many before them, disappeared into the hands of one of my 7 other siblings never to be found again.

After culling my father's slides I ended up with about 1000 I wanted to scan. After culling my own slides I ended up with another 250 slides. Additionally, I had about 250 slides from my grandfather slides And after that I decided to go through my color negative collection and scan the best of those as well. A daunting project! But honestly well worth the effort.

Most of my father's slides are Kodachrome. Much has been written about the inability of this scanner to scan Kodachrome slides and said about ICE4 not working with Kodachrome. Well, I have some good news The ICE4 does work extremely well for the most part. However, with Kodachrome slides it does produce minor artifacts in about 5 percent of the slides. I scanned with ICE (not ICE4) always on and then rescanned if I encountered unacceptable artifacts. I did notice that the scanner ICE feature was more likely to be stumped by old Kodachrome slides where subjects were wearing shirts with stripes.

The GEM ROC and DEE (the other stalwarts of the ICE4 other than ICE itself) work on Kodachrome slides as well, but I found that the results were unpredictable and that I could achieve better results myself in Photoshop far more quickly. The GEM ROC and DEE features simply took too long and slowed down the scanning unacceptably. The results, for me, were not worth the additional scanning time. So I never used these features. But the "enhance" feature on the scanner I used nearly 100% of the time with great results - much better than the GEM ROC and DEE features.

The scanner is fast and does produce wonderful wonderful detailed scans, easily demonstrating the grain in the transparancies at 3000 and 4000 dpi. The Kodachrome slides were a challenge to the Dynamic Range of the scanner, but I believe that most of the detail in the shadows that is there was extracted. With dark slides I used the VERY useful gain feature turning it all the way up to 2 in the really dark slides. Unfortunately, Kodachrome, with all of its many attributes, does have substantial downsides including a very narrow exposure latitude and shadow detail is simply lacking. I think the scanner accurately reproduced the information including the colors on the Kodachrome slides, with perhaps a slight bluish cast noticed in some cases.

It wasn't until I was finished scanning all of the culled slides that I undertook to scan my select color negatives. And this scanner really came into its own scanning color negatives. Don't even TRY to scan color negatives without ICE because the results are unbelievably bad. Even pristine negatives have scratches and dust that magically are erased by the ICE feature. What a godsend. The scanned color negatives were just beautiful with very accurate color rendition. But immediately I noticed much more grain in the color negatives (Royal Gold and Fuji Superia Gold) than in the scanned slides.

One note unrelated to the scanner itself. Until you've used a digital scanner to scan your color negatives you can't begin to realize how far superior Kodachrome, Provia, and Ektachrome slides are to color negatives insofar as capturing detail. Even the best color negatives have much more grain that Kodachrome. And the difference in color negatives is substantial too.

The included Nikon software worked fantastic for me. I downloaded a copy of VueScan which according to many reviews is superior to the Nikon software and found that for me the Nikon software was easier to work with and produced superior results.

The software did cause my computer to crash occasionally which was an aggravation, but a minor one when considered against its many attributes.

Setup Summary: I scanned at a 8 bit color depth (to reduce file size to 55MB and because I could not see a difference between 8 and 16 bit depth in the old slides) and 4000 pixels per inch with the scan enhancer turned on and the Digital ICE turned on. I did not use GEM ROC and DEE because of inconsistent results. I turned up the gain as necessary for dark slides and turned it down for light slides. Gain adjustments were only necessary on about 15 - 20% of the slides. The only two variables that I used once I was set up and running were gain adjustment and type of film or slide. All other adjustments were made in PS IF necessary. The scan at these settings took 90 seconds.


Setting up the Nikon Scan window was a little tricky too. I placed the tool palette in the far upper right corner of the window with the scan window placed under it to the right. The image window occupied the largest portion space to the left.

I can recommend this scanner without reservation. It is a phenomenal piece of equipment.

Works beautifully, although slower than you might expect
I am using this product almost exclusively for slide scanning, so my comments only apply to that aspect of this product.

If you are like me and wondering whether you should suffer through using a consumer level slide scanner or fork out the dough for this one, then the quality this produces when scanning dark slides should be enough to convince you alone. And that's just the beginning. I've used consumer level scanners before and no amount of tweaking or photoshop'ing can match the quality the Coolscan 5000 produces. For professionals, this is of course a no brainer, but for semi-professional folks like me, this is a major investment, and I needed some convincing that it would be worth it. I am now convinced.

Don't put too much stock into the scan times (and feed times for the sf-210 auto feeder). These times are without any Digital ICE, auto exposure, auto focus, etc. However, I have found if you do not use these features, you are wasting your time. After much tweaking to get all the settings such that the final result looked just like the original slide, I am looking at about 1 minute and 30 seconds per slide using the sf-210 (AMD 2.2 Ghz 1GB Ram, scanning at 2000 dpi)

I have found that without tweaking, you get a bluish hue (although a little less so for Kodachrome slides). I have turned red up +20 and blue down +20 (green at 0) and to me, this seems to give the best results (ymmv).

Use the digital ice features!!! They are simply amazing. The dust and scratch removal is phenomenal. The grain removal is also wonderful - and it keeps the picture sharp much more so than using a software filter like those found in Photoshop. Personally, I set the Digital ROC (color restoration and correction) to 0 because it is too unpredictable.

Lastly, use a bright, high quality LCD monitor! You would be amazed at the difference this can make when doing color matching, especially on dark pictures. I was astonished to see the difference.

When you take the above into consideration, this scanner is superb. Plan on spending a few hours getting your settings just right, but after that, sit back and enjoy. I've done 8x10 prints of my slides (scanned at 2000 dpi) that are just beautiful. It is near impossible to match the luminance and beauty of a projected slide, but the Coolscan 5000 does a darn good job.

Good scanner but be aware
I've been doing this for some time and have Nikon gear top to bottom. I have the slide feeder and the negative adapter that lets you feed full strips into it. Both work well 90% of the time. I get mis-feeds on the slides from time to time.

You will get a bluish hue on your negatives. I have tried several films and they all yield the same problem. Expect to take some time in Photoshop to correct this problem. I am taking the advice of a poster to alter my color settings to compensate.

Here is the biggest issue with this scanner. PROPERLY exposed slides scan dark. This is with Fuji 50/100/400 and Kodak. This is a known issue and you will see dozens of posts all over about this problem. Flat and dark scans that need to have the analog gain pumped up to compensate. This throws off GEM and ROC and makes the software unusable. It also washes out detail and increases grain. I contacted Nikon and they stated that Fuji has a 4th layer of emulsion that impedes scans. This is not true for slides, there is no 4th layer. End conclusion, there is a problem with the scanner design. Nikon has failed to give a reason why this is occurring other then to point the finger at someone else. If it was just my problem, I would say it was something on my end, but there are dozens of people stating the same thing on many different photo boards.

ROC and GEM are "OK". I would scan clean unless there is an obvious problem with the neg/pos that needs to be addressed. Any time you alter grain or the physical layer of the film you are altering original quality. See what you have first before changing setting across the board.

If you have any questions about this, my AOL-AIM is above as my Amazon username. This would include Nikon if the finally have a reason WHY there are issues. Overall, it's a good scanner. I would buy it again, but at least I would know what to expect and not expect it all as advertised.