Like the 35mm film scanners of the 5th generation Coolscan V and Super Coolscan 5000 the new Super Coolscan 9000 has been considerably lower priced. This lower price basically came off because the scan software Silverfast isn't supplied anymore. The spec sheet of the predecessor LS-8000 ED was top-class already, the spec sheet of the LS-9000 ED barely differs from its predecessor's.
Nikon Coolscan 8000 Software
You'll get Version 4 of the scan software NikonScan. Furthermore there is NikonView for editing raw files (the same program that you know >from Nikon's digital cameras). Silverfast, which was still supplied with the predecessor LS-8000, is not supplied anymore with the new LS-9000. Hence it's clear how the price reduction compared to the predecessor mainly comes about. It's a pitty that Nikon removed the professional software Silverfast because of rationalisation. Nikonscan indeed is a very good scan software, but Silverfast has got the advantage that it's embedded in a professional colour management workflow with its possibility of IT-8 calibration. Since this scanner is definitely not for beginners colour management simply is part of working with it. So you have to purchase Silverfast separately.
I've already mentioned above that Nikon does not ship its new film scanners 5, 5000 and 9000 with Silverfast anymore. Thereby the price reduction compared to the predecessors LS-40, LS-4000 and LS-8000 levels out - thus the scanners didn't really get cheaper, they were only reduced in the scope of delivery. Nikon supplies a twopart software bundle with the filmscanners:
The scan software Silverfast was yet included in delivery of the predecessor Nikon 8000, thus virtually every owner of this scanner was using the professional Silverfast software. Of course Silverfast offers a good deal more settings than Nikonscan but image quality does not extensively increase when using Silverfast instead of Nikonscan normally. Not until you perform an IT-8 colour calibration.
Ed Hamrick, author of the highly regarded VueScan software has just written to say that his latest version supporting the LS-8000 is now available. He also explains below why the scanner is limited to a maximum of 6X9cm scans and also the reason for some banding problems that have been reported.
I use a Nikon LS-8000ED scanner with Vuescan software. The information that I give below should work perfectly for any Nikon Scanner, and should be pretty close with other film scanners. I use Vuescan, rather than Nikon's scanner software, because Nikon stopped supporting Nikon Scan years ago. It tends to be unstable on later versions of PowerPC OS-X and Windows, and may not work at all on the Intel Macs. My instructions below are for the Professional Version of Vuescan, using the advanced control set. Vuescan's Mac and Windows versions are identical, so these settings work on either OS.
The 8000 ED is a "FireWire" (IEEE 1394) connected device, a virtual necessity due to the enormous amounts of data it's capable of generating. A single version is sold for both Mac and PC platforms, including an IEEE 1394 interface card with both Mac and PC driver software in the box with the unit. The maximum resolution of the 8000 ED is 4000 dpi, resulting in a maximum image size of 3,654 x 5,646 pixels when scanning 35mm film. The total scanning area is an enormous 10,000 x 13,860 pixels. (Depending on the film format being scanned, this total possible area will be cropped somewhat. The maximum "real" scanning area is 8,964 x 11,016 pixels on 6x7 film, up to 10,000 x 13,176 pixels on 6x9.) This represents an enormous amount of data - A maximum resolution scan in 14-bit mode can result in a file size as large as 790 megabytes. (!)
The 8000 ED comes equipped out of the box for scanning both 35mm slides and film strips and medium-format film strips. Several adapters are available as accessories and accommodate a range of film sizes and types, including 120/220 film (sizes 6x4.5 to 6x9), medical slides (from electron microscopes), and 16mm filmstrips. All adapters can be "hot swapped," in that they can be changed without powering-down the scanner or requiring any special operations in the software. In practice, we found this a very useful feature, as we could switch between slides and negatives rapidly, without interrupting our workflow.
Color ManagementMost low-end scanners give you no choice about the "color space" thescan is performed in, simply making some broad assumption about the sort ofmonitor you're using, and how it is set up. By contrast, Nikon Scan and the8000 ED provide a choice of a wide range of color spaces, and screen gamma settingsof 1.8 and 2.2 (the default gammas for Windows and Macintosh monitors, respectively).With the color management option enabled, Nikon Scan also supports the fullICC-standard workflow. The software chooses an input profile based on the scannermodel it detects, uses the one of the offered color spaces as the "edit"profile, and allows you to specify a monitor profile for accurate screen display.(You'd develop your own monitor profile using any of a number of available profilingapplications.) The chart below (courtesy Nikon USA Inc) shows the colorimetricparameters for the standard edit color spaces offered.
Film HandlingThe Super Coolscan 8000 ED comes with three film holders, one for mounted 35mm slides, one for loose strips of 35mm film, and a third 120/220 strip film adapter that accommodates negative sizes from 6x4.5 to 6x9 cm. The various film adapters plug into a long cavity in the front of the unit. As mentioned earlier, the various media adapters can be plugged and unplugged with impunity at any time the 8000 ED isn't actually scanning. The scanner and driver software automatically recognize which adapter is currently in use.
Bug: Image Misalignment, prescan/scanWe're not sure if this properly falls under "film handling", but it seemed like a good place to mention it. We encountered an annoying bug in the operation of Nikon Scan 3 with the Super Coolscan 8000 ED, when setting the cropping from the image preview window. The problem was that the cropping wasn't accurate! If we set the cropping carefully to just the area we wanted, we'd often end up with a portion of the image that was displaced a bit from what we'd specified. This wasn't a show-stopper, as cropping in scan preview windows is rarely accurate to the pixel level (meaning you're most likely always going to have to trim the images in an imaging program later), but we'd never before encountered this sort of significant, consistent error. To make sure we got the part of the image we were actually looking for, we had to routinely crop about 10-20% larger than we wanted, at least in the highest-resolution scan modes. (For what it's worth, we believe we saw this more often with the 6x7 film adapter than the 35mm, but didn't spend a lot of time trying to narrow down just when/how it happened vs not.) As we said, not an insuperable obstacle, but definitely something Nikon should fix in subsequent software releases. (And clearly something that should have been caught in software testing before release.)
PerformanceThe extraordinary power of the 8000 ED leads to a fairly complicated set of controls (as seen above), but Nikon's new scanning software does a good job of segregating functions into logical groups, making it easy to keep track of where you are and what you're adjusting. Tweaking the scanning controls manually to get the "perfect" scan proved slightly time-consuming (depending on how fanatical we got about getting things exactly right, it could be very time-consuming!), but the results were well worth it, especially on "problem" slides. For more ordinary tasks, the automatic adjustment button on the "curves" control panel made one-click adjustments that were surprisingly accurate. In many cases, many minutes of fine-tuning and manual tweaking produced results only marginally better than the one-click curves adjustment. If you can stay within the range of control afforded by the automated options in Nikon Scan 3, the 8000 ED is a very efficient scanner to work with. If you find that you need to delve into the "deeper" parts of the software's capabilities though, things can slow considerably.
While Nikon doesn't report many scanning times for the Super Coolscan 8000 ED (as compared to the 4000 ED and Coolscan IV), we're concerned that the times we measured were so much longer than those claimed by Nikon (377 seconds vs 150 seconds for a full-frame 6x7 scan). Of course, we were working with a 500 MHz G4 PowerMac in a 400 MB memory partition, using the internal FireWire connection, while Nikon's times were collected on an 850 MHz Pentium III system, running Windows, and using Nikon's provided FireWire card. It's entirely possible therefore, that Windows users would see the much faster scan times Nikon reports. Given that our G4 was running very recent system software (OS 9.1), and is a reasonably fast machine, we expect that other Mac users could expect the kinds of times we found. On a positive note though, we were quite able to work on other tasks on the computer while the scanner was working in the background: Other than times we were collecting the performance figures listed above (when we didn't want to do anything that might impede the scan), we managed to get quite a lot of other work done while the scanner was cranking away.
Another problem with Nikonscan is itsvoracious appetite for computer memory. This program hogs RAM asno other application I've used. Never, ever, consider runningNikonscan on a computer with "only" 512 MB or less ofRAM. It needs at least 1 GB of RAM to work effortlessly, and moreis even better. I set up a dual-CPU PC with 2 GB of RAM just inorder to serve the LS-8000 ED adequately. On this system,Nikonscan purrs along quite happily - while it lasts, that is. Ihave never used a software prior to Nikonscan with anything likethis instability. The program easily could crash 100 (!) times aday, under all kind of "contingencies" (removing thefilm holder, asking for a preview, changing a scan parameter,during batch scanning, and so on in nauseum, in fact,just by using the damned software). This exceedingly poorsoftware was responsible for delaying this review for more thantwo months, simply because I never could get the sample scans Ineeded for assessing the scanner's qualities and features. 2ff7e9595c
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