James King wrote:
> I have owned the 5400 mk1 and the scan dual 4 (cheap but poor). I
> found that the 5400 would sometimes leave the tray inside the
> scanner and I would have to poke the manual eject hole with pin to
> free the tray.
This definitely isn't one of those "my scanner is better than your
scanner" responses, but I do feel the urge to mention my experiences
with the Nikon Coolscan V-ED.
In the year now that I've owned the scanner, I've had ONE
misfeed/jam. This was totally caused by human error! I tried
putting a single negative frame in the roll feeder. That forced me
to remove the roll-feeder and disassemble it. Wow, what terrific
engineering. The thing came apart like a copy machine and I got to
see the innards. Very, very well designed and built. It's as close
to industrial engineering as I've ever seen in a consumer-grade
product.
> sharpness wise the 9000ed is a little better the
> most telling difference is ccd noise. The 5400 using 16 passes is
> STILL more noisy than the 9000ed on 1 pass. The 5400 is faster at
> scanning...
My Nikon tends to slightly blur the image. I noticed this with the
Coolscan II, but came to realize that it was par for the course. But
to what level does it blur? Not much, but on a single pass it
doesn't resolve individual grains into grains. Four-pass with
Vuescan pretty much pulls every ounce of detail out of the film,
though. There really isn't anything more to gain after that.
As far as CCD noise is concerned, I had to apply a few little tricks
of the trade to maximize my dynamic range. What I discovered is that
the scanner will under-expose during the scan to protect highlights
(slides). I manually adjust the scan exposure to get my histogram as
far to the right as possible. (yes, expose to the right). Once I do
that, I rarely have any problem with noise. The V-ED is as quiet as
I could ever imagine. Once in a while banding will crop up, but this
seems to be more of an issue of light-leakage through the front
feeder than anything. I drape a black t-shirt over the scanner if
I'm scanning during the daytime.
Speed of scanning is REALLY SLOW if you've got all the functions of
ICE turned on. Gut-wrench slow. With the Nikon software, I usually
just have the dust-scratch removal turned on. The processing occurs
internal to the scanner and it is not a very fast processor. With
Vuescan, the noise-removal occurs in the computer. Much faster, but
you get different artifacts and things happening. With Vuescan, I
tend to just do multi-pass scanning (with one long-exposure pass) and
no noise removal. Unless the slide/negative is really grotty, I can
clean it up pretty fast in an editor. Of course, changing my film
cleaning method has really made a difference too.
AG
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