Nikon Coolscan V


I recently purchased a used Nikon F5, one of the best film camera's ever made (in 35mm format), and since we are living in a digital world, I have been looking for a decent photo scanner. After comparing prices and featuring, I decided that the Coolscan V was the best choice for me. I preferred a specialized photo scanner to a universal one with a photo option. The reason behind this was among others, space on my desk. I already have a small office combo (printer/scanner/copier) and I didn't want to add a large flatbed scanner to it. I have been looking at Nikon scanners, since the excellent Minolta's are not sold anymore, since Minolta stopped that activity a few years ago. The V model is the low-medium end version. That means in practice slower (40 secs to scan instead of 20 secs for the 5000 version), no special accessories to batch scan a large film roll, 14 bits depth instead of 16 bits. Those are the main differences. I considered that those were not critical for my kind of applications.

A few pics of the scanner:

The top view

The front view

The accessories

Pro's

- compact
- accessories to scan a film strip and slides
- excellent picture quality
- excellent configurable software with a lot of options to improve picture quality
    (ICE to remove dust spots, etc... color improvement etc...)
- high resolution high quality scan (equivalent to a 20 Mpixels picture)
- BW and color modes
- reasonably priced (price/performance ratio)
- good documentation

Con's

- software a bit complicated to use to get the best results (some experimenting is needed)
- slow overall process (this is true for all scanners)
- "only" 14 bits compared to high end professional scanners (16 bits)
- ICE (Image Correction and Enhancement - a hardware system to eliminate scratches and dust) is not working with BW film, because the film contains silver particles making the process inoperent.

A scanning example:
see the F5 chapter at the end