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- Average user rating: 3.0 stars out of 12 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
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11 out of 11 people found this review helpful
3.0 stars
"I Hate This Thing but it Does a Great Job"
Pros: Excellent quality 35mm negative/slide scanning
Cons: Absolutely HORRIBLE software, capable hardware intentionally handicapped to prevent scanning film other than 35mm, Frustrating experience overall.
Summary: Nikon makes little or no effort to give the consumer a satisfying experience. I purchased an Epson V700 in addition to this scanner because both my parents gave up on it. Vuescan and Silverfast offer great alternatives to the NikonScan interface, but their infrared cleaning options are still too much weaker than the official Digital ICE supplied with the NikonScan interface. If your negatives and slides are in GOOD condition, VueScan or Silverfast will fix your NikonScan woes, and in that case you've got a great 35mm (35mm ONLY) scanner. If you need the Digital ICE, you need to use the supremely awful NikonScan software interface. For that reason alone this scanner becomes just too frustrating to use. The rest of my review/tirade is about NikonScan.
I have spent a LOT of time working with this scanner. So understand these are cumulative complaints over an extended period. Short term occasional use might not show any of these issues, who knows. Maybe the software has a memory leak.. Anyway here's my feeling on it after one year. The NikonScan scanning software supplied with this product is clunky, counterintuitive, crash-prone, and rarely upgraded. It says right out of the box "Not Compatible with Photoshop." Attempts to import with Photoshop CS2 do in fact crash the interface and lock up Photoshop.
Given the amount of time necessary to fix a damaged slide, the defects of NikonScan become overwhelming. Changing almost any of the settings causes the scanner to re-scan the slide, and it really starts to wear on you after a while. This program does way too many "vanishing crashes" where it just blips out of existance with no warning, meaning all work is lost. I have been scanning dust damaged slides from Vietnam with this thing, and it does take up to 15 minutes per slide just getting the initial scan to work right before going to Photoshop to do color corrections. When the program "blips" away in the 14th minute you want to kill something. Unfortunately settings which should be "sticky" reset themselves randomly, and are lost when the program crashes in mid preview.
It's possible to get results from NikonScan, but you better prepare yourself for the troubles ahead.
Just for the record, I've installed and used the scanner on Windows 2000 Pro, XP Pro SP1 & SP2, and XP Home. The problems translate perfectly to each machine.
