Ice and gem occationally produce extra artifacts, but most of the time this setting works best for me.
I tend to scan using max resolution (4000 ppi), 14 bit, with ice normal and gem(2-4). Background scanning is a nice thing to have, but if you use post processing (roc/gem), then, my computer at least, crawls almost to a halt, making any productive work almost impossible. It''s pretty stable (version 3.1), but the Photoshop plug-in occasionally crashes on my 3 year old B/W G3/400.
NIKON SCAN 3.1.2 SOFTWARE
The software is impressive but needs some GUI improvements. The ice-feature is great and roc/gem is a sending from god, when dealing with old or faded films. It´s my fourth film scanner and it consistantly produces the best results. My initial reaction to the Coolscan 4000 ED is very positive. Also, I didn''t find the software as easy to use as Nikon''s.īasically, I''ve found this unit to be an excellent bridge between the negative world and digital (I''m not quite ready to spring for a D1x and have thousands of negatives and slides I want to digitize). (That unit just sits in my basement now). I could only scan 4 negatives at a time and it was very time consuming to mount them in the holder etc. Initially, I purchased a Minolta Dimage Scan Elite and quickly realized that it wasn''t suitable for the kind of work I do. I use an 80 GByte external Firewire Maxtor drive for saving my negatives until I''ve finished working with them. I then have Adobe photoshop do a number of activities to all of the negs at once (cropping, rotating, and saving as smaller files in a separate directory for easy viewing). It takes about 1.5 hours to scan a roll of 36 but since I don''t need to monitor the operation, it is quite painless. I have this unit scanning film virtually 24 hours/day which I get developed uncut. However, the unit would not be much use to me without these adapters. Obviously, I had to purchase the roll film adapter (SA-30) and also got the slide feeder (the only downside is the 2 adapters cost almost as much as the scanner did).
I shoot a lot of weddings for friends and other events (sports and dance) and scan 30 to 50 rolls/month. I use it mostly with an HP N5195 laptop (700 Mhz, 128 megs RAM) to which I''ve added a firwire PCMCIA card. I have already scanned many thousands of negatives with it and it only crashed once or twice at the beginning. I have been using this product for about 9 months now, and have nothing but good things to say about it.