Nikon Super CoolScan 5000 ED Film Scanner Reviews

• An outstanding scanner and a pleasure to use!

  
  By A3IPSECQAUAT8V on 2004-05-24
  First of all, let me say I am a neophyte when it comes to scanning. My mother passed away recently and I wanted to go through my father's 20,000 slides and scan the best ones before they, as many before them, disappeared into the hands of one of my 7 other siblings never to be found again.
  
  After culling my father's slides I ended up with about 1000 I wanted to scan. After culling my own slides I ended up with another 250 slides. Additionally, I had about 250 slides from my grandfather slides And after that I decided to go through my color negative collection and scan the best of those as well. A daunting project! But honestly well worth the effort.
  
  Most of my father's slides are Kodachrome. Much has been written about the inability of this scanner to scan Kodachrome slides and said about ICE4 not working with Kodachrome. Well, I have some good news The ICE4 does work extremely well for the most part. However, with Kodachrome slides it does produce minor artifacts in about 5 percent of the slides. I scanned with ICE (not ICE4) always on and then rescanned if I encountered unacceptable artifacts. I did notice that the scanner ICE feature was more likely to be stumped by old Kodachrome slides where subjects were wearing shirts with stripes.
  
  The GEM ROC and DEE (the other stalwarts of the ICE4 other than ICE itself) work on Kodachrome slides as well, but I found that the results were unpredictable and that I could achieve better results myself in Photoshop far more quickly. The GEM ROC and DEE features simply took too long and slowed down the scanning unacceptably. The results, for me, were not worth the additional scanning time. So I never used these features. But the "enhance" feature on the scanner I used nearly 100% of the time with great results - much better than the GEM ROC and DEE features.
  
  The scanner is fast and does produce wonderful wonderful detailed scans, easily demonstrating the grain in the transparancies at 3000 and 4000 dpi. The Kodachrome slides were a challenge to the Dynamic Range of the scanner, but I believe that most of the detail in the shadows that is there was extracted. With dark slides I used the VERY useful gain feature turning it all the way up to 2 in the really dark slides. Unfortunately, Kodachrome, with all of its many attributes, does have substantial downsides including a very narrow exposure latitude and shadow detail is simply lacking. I think the scanner accurately reproduced the information including the colors on the Kodachrome slides, with perhaps a slight bluish cast noticed in some cases.
  
  It wasn't until I was finished scanning all of the culled slides that I undertook to scan my select color negatives. And this scanner really came into its own scanning color negatives. Don't even TRY to scan color negatives without ICE because the results are unbelievably bad. Even pristine negatives have scratches and dust that magically are erased by the ICE feature. What a godsend. The scanned color negatives were just beautiful with very accurate color rendition. But immediately I noticed much more grain in the color negatives (Royal Gold and Fuji Superia Gold) than in the scanned slides.
  
  One note unrelated to the scanner itself. Until you've used a digital scanner to scan your color negatives you can't begin to realize how far superior Kodachrome, Provia, and Ektachrome slides are to color negatives insofar as capturing detail. Even the best color negatives have much more grain that Kodachrome. And the difference in color negatives is substantial too.
  
  The included Nikon software worked fantastic for me. I downloaded a copy of VueScan which according to many reviews is superior to the Nikon software and found that for me the Nikon software was easier to work with and produced superior results.
  
  The software did cause my computer to crash occasionally which was an aggravation, but a minor one when considered against its many attributes.
  
  Setup Summary: I scanned at a 8 bit color depth (to reduce file size to 55MB and because I could not see a difference between 8 and 16 bit depth in the old slides) and 4000 pixels per inch with the scan enhancer turned on and the Digital ICE turned on. I did not use GEM ROC and DEE because of inconsistent results. I turned up the gain as necessary for dark slides and turned it down for light slides. Gain adjustments were only necessary on about 15 - 20% of the slides. The only two variables that I used once I was set up and running were gain adjustment and type of film or slide. All other adjustments were made in PS IF necessary. The scan at these settings took 90 seconds.
  
  
  Setting up the Nikon Scan window was a little tricky too. I placed the tool palette in the far upper right corner of the window with the scan window placed under it to the right. The image window occupied the largest portion space to the left.
  
  I can recommend this scanner without reservation. It is a phenomenal piece of equipment.
  
  

• Works beautifully, although slower than you might expect

  
  By A1W58O5TOAVHW0 on 2004-06-13
  I am using this product almost exclusively for slide scanning, so my comments only apply to that aspect of this product.

  If you are like me and wondering whether you should suffer through using a consumer level slide scanner or fork out the dough for this one, then the quality this produces when scanning dark slides should be enough to convince you alone. And that's just the beginning. I've used consumer level scanners before and no amount of tweaking or photoshop'ing can match the quality the Coolscan 5000 produces. For professionals, this is of course a no brainer, but for semi-professional folks like me, this is a major investment, and I needed some convincing that it would be worth it. I am now convinced.

  Don't put too much stock into the scan times (and feed times for the sf-210 auto feeder). These times are without any Digital ICE, auto exposure, auto focus, etc. However, I have found if you do not use these features, you are wasting your time. After much tweaking to get all the settings such that the final result looked just like the original slide, I am looking at about 1 minute and 30 seconds per slide using the sf-210 (AMD 2.2 Ghz 1GB Ram, scanning at 2000 dpi)

  I have found that without tweaking, you get a bluish hue (although a little less so for Kodachrome slides). I have turned red up +20 and blue down +20 (green at 0) and to me, this seems to give the best results (ymmv).

  Use the digital ice features!!! They are simply amazing. The dust and scratch removal is phenomenal. The grain removal is also wonderful - and it keeps the picture sharp much more so than using a software filter like those found in Photoshop. Personally, I set the Digital ROC (color restoration and correction) to 0 because it is too unpredictable.

  Lastly, use a bright, high quality LCD monitor! You would be amazed at the difference this can make when doing color matching, especially on dark pictures. I was astonished to see the difference.

  When you take the above into consideration, this scanner is superb. Plan on spending a few hours getting your settings just right, but after that, sit back and enjoy. I've done 8x10 prints of my slides (scanned at 2000 dpi) that are just beautiful. It is near impossible to match the luminance and beauty of a projected slide, but the Coolscan 5000 does a darn good job.
  
  

• Good scanner but be aware

  
  By AFQ44TIRPT1YE on 2004-11-06
  I've been doing this for some time and have Nikon gear top to bottom. I have the slide feeder and the negative adapter that lets you feed full strips into it. Both work well 90% of the time. I get mis-feeds on the slides from time to time.
  
  You will get a bluish hue on your negatives. I have tried several films and they all yield the same problem. Expect to take some time in Photoshop to correct this problem. I am taking the advice of a poster to alter my color settings to compensate.
  
  Here is the biggest issue with this scanner. PROPERLY exposed slides scan dark. This is with Fuji 50/100/400 and Kodak. This is a known issue and you will see dozens of posts all over about this problem. Flat and dark scans that need to have the analog gain pumped up to compensate. This throws off GEM and ROC and makes the software unusable. It also washes out detail and increases grain. I contacted Nikon and they stated that Fuji has a 4th layer of emulsion that impedes scans. This is not true for slides, there is no 4th layer. End conclusion, there is a problem with the scanner design. Nikon has failed to give a reason why this is occurring other then to point the finger at someone else. If it was just my problem, I would say it was something on my end, but there are dozens of people stating the same thing on many different photo boards.
  
  ROC and GEM are "OK". I would scan clean unless there is an obvious problem with the neg/pos that needs to be addressed. Any time you alter grain or the physical layer of the film you are altering original quality. See what you have first before changing setting across the board.
  
  If you have any questions about this, my AOL-AIM is above as my Amazon username. This would include Nikon if the finally have a reason WHY there are issues. Overall, it's a good scanner. I would buy it again, but at least I would know what to expect and not expect it all as advertised.
  
  

• Beware of Nikon Super CoolScan Slide Feeder

  
  By A1D304C6DEGR97 on 2004-11-21
  We purchased a Super Coolscan 5000 ED with SF-210 slide feeders, hoping to scan my parents' thousands of Kodak slides. The Super Coolscan worked flawlessly on single slides, but the SF-210 slide feeder simply could not scan more than 2 slides without jamming.
  
  The instruction manual does say that the feeder basically works only with Fuji compatible slide mounts, and warns of problems with Kodak and other mounts - but it's buried in the middle of the manual and you don't find out until you've purchased the producdt. I have been unable to find those restrictions mentioned anywhere inthe literature. At nearly $400 per feeder, I would expect it to work - or at least have the sales literature mention its limitations.
  
  I complained to Nikon, but never even received an email response. I will never buy a Nikon product again.
  
  

• Best 35mm film scanner under $50,000

  
  By A197FWSLBEJ1WF on 2004-04-12
  The previous generation (CS IV and CS 4000) were hard to top, but Nikon did it yet again. Scans are smooth and gorgeous, color accuracy (provided your monitor is calibrated) is unrivaled and the updated ICE4 including DEE are a blessing. In fact the scans are so good that I have started to prefer CS5000 scans from well exposed Fuji Provia 100F or Astia 100F slides than images from a 6MP DSLR. Hard to believe but thats true.

  Did I mention scanning speed ? I timed a 4000 DPI scan with digital ICE turned off, on a P4 2.6Ghz with 1 GB ram and USB2. It took 17 seconds from begining to end (excluding autofocus and auto exposure). Thats right. Actually three seconds faster than Nikon's claim of 20 sec. Beat that Minolta.

  IMO the next step up can only be a $50K HowTek drum scanner ;)
  
  

• Fantastic, great for Slides!
  By on 2004-03-25
  I am glad I waited to purchase this scanner; it's an updated version with Digital Ice 4, and for A LOT less than the previous model.

  I also purchased the automated Slide feeder with this, and it is nothing short of a miracle! The Digital ROC and Digital ICE is unbelievable with old slides, particularly Kodachromes. There are plenty of customizable enhancement settings to keep me busy for a long time.

  I use this for business; this scanner will pay for itself with one bulk slide scanning order.

  Love it, love it!
  
  

• Film4life
  By AFYHI7VU26AWL on 2005-11-15
  Ok, if you've been thinking about this scanner or just doing a bit of research stop right now and buy this scanner. I am a die hard film fan for a number of reasons a few of those I'll go into in a minute. Whether you are still shooting film and want the convenience of printing your own photos or you have 6,000 slides and negs that have been sitting in your attic waiting for you to scan them in, this is the scanner for you.
  
  I have most of my images scanned into my computer already. I got into scanning my film in and printing my own stuff in 2002. I bought the Canon FS2720U film scanner but since I bought the Nikon 5000ED I have a new found obsession with scanning in my photos and I am re-scanning all my old photos with this scanner.
  
  This scanner picks up details in the shadows like I've never seen. The colors are spot on and the sharpness is brilliant. I use Provia 100F which is arguably the best film ever made and this is the only scanner that can capture Provia's amazing grain and true to life tones.
  
  If you are thinking about going digital but are still undecided this scanner should make that decision a lot easier. Why go digital when there is a scanner like this out there? You can buy the best film camera ever made the Canon EOS 1V, a great L lens and use a film like Provia 100F with this scanner and get resutls that only the best digital camera's can match. The only camera digital camera on earth that can equal that combination is the Canon EOS 1DS Mark II and for $7,500 wouldn't you rather wait a few years and shoot with the above combo until then? Well that's what I was struggling with for months until I found this scanner.
  
  I haven't used the slide adaptor to batch scan so I can't comment on that. The speed of the Nikon 5000ED is just fine. I have it at the highest settings for everything, highest for resolution, highest for ICE (brilliant by the way) and highest for multi pass and I get an image in about 3 minutes or less. Who cares! You get a 130 megabyte file that looks just like the slide you put into it and you only have to do that once.
  
  Buy this scanner, you won't be sorry.
  
  
  
  
• Not bad, but not great, either
  By A2LBCULYQQIVVS on 2007-06-18
  I've owned this scanner for about 18 months now, and also have the slide and roll feeders. I've scanned about 12,000 images during that time, both slides and negatives.
  
  The good news is, that for well-exposed negatives or slides, this scanner is fast and does a very high quality job. The bad news is that the software is buggy, and Nikon's tech support is non-existent. There are still no 64-bit drivers.
  
  I'm running XP-Pro on an AMD x2 4600+ ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe with 2 GB memory and around a TB of SATA disk. While scanning, one of the two CPUs is totally consumed, but this is probably because of the polled USB driver. There are 3 software errors that keep occurring. First is the well-known Nikon Scan has encountered an error and must close - sorry for trashing your data. This malfunction occurs about every 10-40 frames. It simply requires a restart of the application. It usually happens just after or during a preview setup, so the work loss is minimal, but annoying. Nikon support ignores all reports to their support site of this particular problem.
  
  The second problem is that the scanner software simply freezes. This usually happens in multiscan mode. To recover from this requires that the scanner be power cycled and the software needs to be killed with the task manager. Nikon support has also ignored this bug report.
  
  The third problem is that when a slide jams in the feeder, the application loses communication with the scanner and must be restarted. Not too bad, since I had to manually clear the jam, but really an indication of the poor quality of the software error handling.
  
  The software is incomplete with the slide scanner, in that it doesn't allow a preview scan for each slide like it does for the roll/strip feeder. That is basically a software issue, although the sloppy handling and positioning of the $500 slide feeder is also in play, in that it is probably impossible to get a complete alignment of the second feed with the first. (It actually misses a bit with the strip feeder as well, although not enough to matter.
  
  The slide feeder is a bit of a kludge. It will require some modification to get it to work reliably enough to walk away from, but after a bit of tinkering, cutting and installing a modified pressure plate, it now can feed slides that are in good condition well enough that it seldom jams.
  
  Another problem I have is with the hardware specification - it claims a Dmax of 4.8, which is just the specification of the 16-bit A/D converter attached to the sensor. But the sensor has nowhere near that much dynamic range, so the specification is downright misleading. Because of that, this scanner continues the history of scanners having great difficulty with dense slides. While Dee helps some, the problem of the limited dynamic range of the sensor becomes readily apparent. The amount of smear across high contrast boundaries is intolerable when scanning some very nice Velvia or even Provia images. If you shoot slides for scanning, consider over-exposing by 1/2 stop or so if the subject can tolerate that.
  
  As mentioned earlier, the multi-scan setting does not seem to work very well, due to the software crashing.
  
  Scan image Enhancement is a totally useless piece of software. The ICE works well for dust removal, but may give some image deterioration on some Kodachromes, although most work out okay. ROC works quite well for faded images, such as pre-85 Ektachromes and older negatives. Occasional Kodachromes are also restored. But there doesn't seem to be any difference between the setting from 1-4 that I have been able to detect. And you'll get bizarre results if ROC is one and the n\image hasn't faded.
  GEM is okay for grain reduction, but like most such programs it loses detail fast, so us it sparingly. Faster negatives need it, and some of the older or faster slides films also, but if you can get away without it, then don't turn it on.
  
  Negative scanning is very good, with the colors either well-balanced or easy to correct (Reala, for example, needs some manual setting to get right). But the negatives are grainy compared to slides. So you either get dynamic range problems or grain problems. Pick your favorite imperfection. I find negatives a breeze to scan, but the ultimate quality is not quite as good as a good slide scan, provided the slide is not too dense.
  
  So Nikon gets only three stars for this. The idea is good, but the lack of dynamic range and software problems, coupled with Nikon tech support's utter incompetence or non responsiveness turn this into a mediocre product. Unfortunately, there is nothing much better at a reasonable price. Drum or pseudo-drum scanners may be better (I wouldn't count on it, though), but I don't have 10k to invest.
  
  You'll get as good an image quality from a comparably priced 10MP digital SLR, so unless you have a lot of old stuff to scan, this is not the way to enter the digital age at this point in time. D80, D200 and comparable Canon or Fuji DSLRs give images subjectively as good or better than the scanned images from this scanner and slide film.
  
  
• Best Scanner I Ever Owned !!!
  By A1M1IQZTCPXFJH on 2007-02-04
  I was skeptical that a scanner could ever reproduce what I shot on high quality slide film (ie, Provia 100F). I sold my film camera to buy a Professional Nikon DSLR and now I'm considering buying a Nikon film body again but still keeping my DSLR. The reason being is that slide film is still way better than digital and the Super CoolScan 5000 Ed makes the transition from slide to digital come true.
  
  Your scans will actually represent what you recorded on your slides if you take the following steps. Set the resolution to 4000dpi, Digital ICE to fine, Multi Sample to 16x and Pixel Data Size to 16. It will take some time to sample a slide and your file size will be huge but if you bought expensive slide film because you take pride in your work then this is the way to go. I don't use the other scanning options other than an occasional Digital DEE set to about 10 or so to bring out highlights or shadow detail. Everything else is unpredictable and the scan takes longer. I save everything as NEF files and use Nikon Capture 4 and photoshop to tweak things. Saving as NEF gives me a true slide reproduction from which I can work from (ie, make TIFFs/JPEGs, smaller files and customize my slides without lost of the original scan). It's true these NEF files will not be recognized by Nikon Capture 4 as NEF files but recognized as a regular file.
  
  To save time scanning, you could reduce the resolution to 2000dpi, Digital ICE set to normal, Multi Sample to 4x and Pixel Data Size to 8. These settings will produce a suitable scan that you'll be proud of.
  
  I, too, had a steep learning curve with this scanner. I played with everything and had several hangups with this software. I read every review I could find and read every page of the manual that comes on the disk rather than the book because the disk is far more indepth. As for the software hangups, I did the following. First made sure nothing was running in my computer's background, next went into my firewall and stopped all internet activity incoming and outgoing and lastly went into the Nikon scan software and reset everything to factory defaults. It hasn't hungup once since then.
  
  I hope this helps the frustrated users out there and for those who are thinking about buying a 5000. I do hope this helps you make up your mind. It's a bit pricey but you bought a good camera, you bought expensive slide film, put a lot of time and pride in your photography so this scanner is natural match and won't disappoint.
  
  
  
• Expansive scanner with extermely poor and buggy software
  By A2PFWQVSFKCFGF on 2006-03-23
  One would expect that a company developing professional scanners would have the pride to develop software matching in quality. But you would be greatly disappointed to discover that this grand heavy hardware comes with poor software and therefore only amounts to a mediocre product not worth the money. The software (Nikon Scan) is buggy, leaky and crashes after about the second or third scan of a negative strip. I am running the latest version of Windows XP, with all the patches, and basically have to stop every thing else from running on my 320Ghz, 2GB new PC. This buys me just another single strip before it either freezes, forcing me to kill the application, or it silently crashes. I don't even want to go into the usability and documentation. Enough said. Extremely disappointing and not worth the money.
  
  
• Poor scanner crippled by even worse software
  By A327OEZT23T2IR on 2006-04-26
  This scanner is extremely slow, taking up to several minutes per negative.
  
  The Nikon Scan software that accompanies it is ugly and tries too hard to be user friendly, often making uninvited guesses as to what it thinks you want (remember MS Office and 'Clippy'?). Changing default settings proved to be challenging and it doesn't properly handle BW negatives; the BW scans are often colorized and adjusted, even when the scan is set for "mono" and no adjustments.
  
  A real disappointment.
  
  
• Beware for computers freezing up
  By A2NYL67N5F7AOZ on 2006-05-09
  I have used the 5000 ED for the past week and my computer (running XP home edition) keeps freezing up after scanning 2 - 25 slides, forcing me to perform a cold reboot. I have sent a request to Nikon, but haven't heard a word. If only I could return this unreliable piece of hardware.
  
  
  
• Beware of Nikon Scan software on Mac OS X
  By A33JSMP02WAYFF on 2005-12-04
  The scanner is very good but the software on OS X is a joke, crashes every 5 slides, only 31 character file names, can't handle sleep. Total junk.
  
  
• Worth the money
  By AZSY06CDSFPFA on 2006-02-02
  For years I shot slides - now need to digitize so I can let Photoshop do it's job. Yes, it's expensive. Yes, it's worth it. If I scan a 35mm slide at it's highest resolution I get a file around 90 MB. That's a lot of data!
  
  Other reviewers have gone over the various features, so I feel no need to repeat all that, but I would like to add my voice to those who are quite happy with this scanner.
  
  
• Defective Products out of the Box and Cost of Ownership
  By AS25R96MQEHJW on 2007-05-09
  One star is not for how Nikon products perform once they work properly, it is a measure of the lack of product defects (quality) and the extra costs incurred by the customer to get Nikon scanner products to work properly.
  
  I purchased a CoolScan-IV. When I received it, it was defective out of the box. I contacted Nikon technical support and they told me to exchange it for a new scanner. The new 12-Bit CoolScan-IV worked perfectly. When I was ready to upgrade to 16-Bits, I purchased a CoolScan-5000 and gave my CoolScan-IV away. What a mistake!
  
  This "upgrade" scanner was a total piece of junk. The images were noisy. I immediately contacted Nikon technical support about the problem. After some back and forth, they told me there was nothing wrong with the scanner; I was the problem. I recently found an archive copy of an under-scanned photo that I scanned on the old CoolScan-IV. I compared the images. The CoolScan-IV produced a very good image. The CoolScan-5000 was horrible. Without spending hundreds of dollars to pay Nikon Service to correct Nikon's initial quality defects, I am stuck with a piece of junk.
  
  NikonScan. NikonScan is the scanning software that comes with the Nikon scanners. When it works, NikonScan works acceptably; however, it locks up repeatedly requiring closing the program and reopening it. Earlier versions worked much better in this regard to locking up.
  
  Bottom line, Nikon quality has deteriorated to become very poor. I just described four Nikon product quality problems (initially defective products). There is a fifth: Nikon does not stand behind errors that their technical service personnel make.
  
  Each item described above had additional out of pocket cost or lost time associated with it. I know the scanners can perform exceptionally well once they are working to spec. I would recommend a Nikon scanner only if you are willing to unnecessarily pay out a lot of extra money and waste a lot of time correcting initial Nikon product quality defects and incompetent technical service advice.
  
  
• Crystal Clear Images
  By A23SQPKZJMXZX5 on 2007-03-15
  Purchased this scanner based on the positive reviews for image quality and it has certainly exceeded my expectations. Software is easy to use and and with a little tweaking and experimentation cleans up the slides beautifully. Even incredibly dark, under exposed slides have been resurrected to reveal hidden gems. Scans in single pass mode create near perfect replicas of the original slides, comparing the scans to slides viewed in fine detail with a hand lens. Having scanned over 100 slides, I have experienced the software crash mentioned by other people only 2-3 times. But even then, it's just a simply matter of starting up the software again and I'm back up in running within 30 seconds. There seems to be some correlation to the crashes and waking up my computer from sleep. The scanning process does take a little longer than I would have hoped, but I'm sure that is due to my older computer which only has USB 1.0 capabilities (the scanner comes with USB 2.0 - which is much faster). Having said that, users with older computers need not fear, it's works perfectly with mine. I'm currenly running Mac OS X 10.4.8 on a Power Mac G4 tower (Dual 1.42GHz PowerPC G4 processors).
  
  
• third party software
  By A33JBE5IVY7I49 on 2006-02-03
  Just purchased this product. Although some reviews say that this scanner works with Adobe Photoshop Elements, it does not and Nikon doesn't provide any help. To use this scanner you must scan images in Nikon's software them import them into Photoshop Elements which is cumbersome. The scanned images are OK but not great.
  
  
• Best slide scanner I've used
  By A3KDUN7FK3CR6 on 2007-03-04
  I haven't used many, but this works well for me. ICE is great for getting rid of little specks I can't see. I guess you could do without it, but you'd have to have clean room type slides, mine certainly weren't that clean.
  
  Many of my slides were dark, but the ROC/GEM fixed most of them. I've scanned about 2000 so far. Some I felt were poor, so I rescanned them with ROC/GEM turned off, but couldn't really do any better by hand (but I'm not a super-photoshop expert.)
  
  The scanner did a good job of reproducing the slides and correcting for their age. Sometimes the color correction was worse (< 1% of the time) because of odd lighting conditions, but I just rescanned those few with ROC/GEM turned off.
  
  For some slides that had spots I tried Microsoft Digital Image Suite (it was installed on the machine I was using) and was pleasently surprised to find that it could remove unwanted things fairly easier.
  
  On one machine I got garbled photos, it seems like the USB connection failed quite often, but my machine is suspect. I've had similar issues on the other machine, but very rarely and the software has noticed so I can rescan a slide. (when this happens it seems to lose a scan line or mess up the color for a scan line).
  
  The slide feeder is a must for me, and it has worked pretty well although there are a few types of slides it jams on. (square or extra large frames). 99% of my slides work fine.
  
  Occasionally the software fails, and usually I restart the program &/or power cycle the scanner. Usually it just seems to forget about the scanner after jamming. Rarely (< 0.1% of the time) it has scanned only the red channel or something, which seems pretty wierd. This instability is annoying but reasonably rare. What's most annoying is that simply resetting the software/hardware fixes it, so you'd think it'd be programmed to reset when it started getting confused.
  
  Nikon says that their stuff doesn't run on Vista, however I ran setup with compatibility mode turned on for XP SP2 (right click on setup and click properties). After that it worked fine, and from the other comments it doesn't seem any less stable that what other users have reported.
  
  
  
• Nikon Super CoolScan 5000 ED Film Scanner
  By A1O1E9OFMVC1D9 on 2007-02-03
  It took awhile to get used to scanner, but the learning curve is quite steep. I have an iMac PowerPC G5 and have not had any problems. The manual feed works well especially if you have to make minor adjustements to restore old slides. It is a time consuming process but the results from the 5000 ED are amazing.
  
  
• nikon cool 5000 ED flim scanner
  By A1T6EE39PDQ5PV on 2006-03-21
  user friendly plus
  amazon shipped it right away
  it would have taken longer to secure it locally
  
  
• Film Scanner may extend usefullness of film camera!
  By A2A27HJQBLKGV8 on 2008-01-03
  The scanner works well and its operation is straight forward. It is surprisingly noisy in operation, but this is apparently normal.
  
  Be prepared for large files, if you want the hightest resolution digital photos from film. The high resolution of the film scan yields 20 megapixel digital photos from 35mm film. This means a large (50 Mb JPEG) per photo. Not everything needs to be scanned at highest quality. You can adjust the resolution of the scan, or the quality of the output file, to suit your needs.
  
  A film camera, coupled with the scanner, yields the hightest resolution digital photos. This means my SLR film camera (which has not been used since I started using digital SLR) will now see service when I want the highest quality photos.
  
  
• Great Scanner
  By A2TXGMFX5Y72WC on 2007-06-02
  I have used several other film/slide scanners in the past, the 5000ED really performs. I really like the multi-scan functions for higher signal to noise and 8 or 16 bit files. I highly recommend this scanner for archiving slides and film and for get a good digital image to work with if Photoshop. I have no problems producing 16x20 prints from scanned image. Quality in and Quality out. Quick scans for such high resolution with very consistent work flow. I will be doing a more in-depth review at [...] in the future.
  
  
• Great Scanner
  By AGATRDOFW48DK on 2008-02-11
  I rented this scanner over the weekend to start scanning hundreds of slides. Included was the SF-210 automatic slide feeder. I had imagined putting 25-50 slides in the hopper and coming back periodically to change them.
  
  As it turned out, the SF-210 was a miserable waste of time. See my review of this product.
  
  I had scanned slides with several brands of scanners (Epson and Canon) and found that the result was marginal at best because of dust and dirt. Regardless of how I cleaned the slides and the scanner, the dust was always a problem.
  
  This scanner has the wonderful ICE technology which almost completely eliminates the problem. The 4000 dpi resolution allows cropping.
  
  The software that comes with the scanner, and the updated versions available from the Nikon web site are both clunky and have not kept up with the times. More than a year after Windows Vista was released and they do not have a version that will work with it! I have been a software engineer for decades and know a poor user interface when I see one (Nikon Scan 4.0). For instance, when you choose preferences, it asks you if you want to save them, load them, or use defaults. Not how to set them. Often the software's user feedback is erroneous or confusing. You click on the Scan button and find a minute later that nothing happened. If the scanner jams, it doesn't provide decent error recovery and recommends that you press a button that does not exist.
  
  If you know how to do photo retouching with Photoshop, you will find a way to set up Nikon Scan and then be able to produce some eye-popping results.
  
  It is really unfortunate that the only automatic slide feeder you can use with this product is so completely flawed.
  
  After giving up on using the slide feeder, I was able to scan slides at a rate of one per 2 minutes.
  
  
• Nikon CoolScan 5000 ED
  By A1RPYIG2VQ17NZ on 2007-05-06
  I'm switching from a Polaroid SprintScan 4000 to this Nikon unit because of what I'd heard about the imaging quality of the latter. So far, I'm impressed, especially with the in-system dust and scratch remover with the color images. I do do a lot of b & w scanning and printing, so, in that realm, there's no great difference except that the manual handling of b & w film strips is a bit tricky (with the Nikon). All and all, I'm very pleased with my purchase.
  
  
• Nikon Disappoints Again
  By A27YGJ7F4U8OGN on 2008-05-14
  Until it arrived - and this device is hard to find even on Amazon - I didn't realize the Coolscan 5000 can only scan one slide. One slide! Even my much cheaper Konica-Minolta Dimage IV came with a four-slide adapter that fed the scanner. The 5000 comes with a 35mm film adapter, but that only accepts two to six-frame strips of film. It's a problem, but as usual Nikon as an expensive solution: the SF-210 that stacks up 50 slides to automatically feed the 5000. Amazon has a new SF-210 for $424.95 - or used for $399.95. Another annoyance that surprised me was this USB 2.0 scanner cannot be plugged into a USB hub, it must be plugged into the computer directly, and no other USB devices can be used while you are using the scanner. The manual says on page 22, "The scanner may not function as expected when used with other USB devices. Should the scanner not function as expected, use the scanner with all other USB devices disconnected." Speaking of owner's manual, the manual on the CD, when copied to my hard drive and opened, keeps referring to the paper manual with advice like "for details, see the owner's manual." What! What's the point of putting an owner's manual on a CD if it's not the same manual? Beware of the Nikon Coolscan 5000. You can scan those old slides a lot cheaper.
  
  

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