Eats slides for breakfast

Until the eighties or so, quality-conscious photographers would prefer slide film to color negative film. Most of my childhood pictures my father took are on slides. Slide projectors are going the way of the dodo, and you need to digitize them to preserve them for the future (if they were E6 process film rather than Kodachrome, you have no choice, as the dyes are fading and need digital color recovery in any case).

Scanning is a very laborious process, and feeding slides into a scanner brings back bad memories of the "toaster effect" when you hd to swap floppy disks on a computer, prior to the advent of hard drives. If you are going to scan any non-trivial amount of slides, you will need some automation.

The Nikon SF-210 is a scanner accessory that allows you to run an unattended batch scan of up to 40 or so photographic slides mounted in 5cm mounts. It is the successor to the SF-200, the main difference is a screw that allows you to adjust the thickness of the gat that feeds the slides, this is because many people complained on the older model that it would sometimes misfeed two slides at the same time.

Unfortunately, Nikon charges a pretty penny for this unit, and it is only usable on their more expensive Coolscan 4000ED and 5000ED, not on the entry-level Coolscan IV or V. I guess they have identified the productivity requirements as a "pro" feature, i.e. a license to gouge, and they are probably correct in their assumption. I upgraded from a Coolscan IV to a Coolscan 5000 to be able to use this device and the significant productivity gains it brings over hand-feeding slides one by one.

With Minolta's exit from the photography business and Canon's de facto ceasing of film scanner production, choices are dwindling. The better Epson scanners like the new V750 can take a page of slides on a carrier and automatically detect the grid, but you still have to manually position the slides in the carrier.

On the SF-210, you simply pull a spring-loaded stop, drop the slides, and the attachment takes care of the rest. I have not experienced jamming despite feeding it a mix of Kodachrome cardboard mounts and thicker plastic mounts.

You are not completely free from prep work. You need to make sure they are all aligned properly in landscape mode, with the emulsion facing the right way. If your slides are jumbled, you need to make sure you separate Kodachrome from E-6 since the former need to be scanned with ICE (infrared-based dust detection and removal) off as Kodachrome is opaque to infrared.

I run my scanner on a Mac, and the Nikon Scan software would crash all the time in the middle of a batch, thus making the device pointless. I switched to Hamrick Software's VueScan, and it works flawlessly now.

My workflow is the following as I am slowly going through my father's slides:

1. Load the slides into the SF-210
2. Set the batch scan parameters in VueScan to the highest quality (yielding over 4GB of files for a single box of slides!)
3. Start the batch scanning in the background. The LS-5000 is fast, but at 4000dpi 16-bit, it will take about an hour to go through all the slides. Keep working on the computer or go out for a walk.
4. Save the raw scans to a 1TB external firewire drive
5. Color-correct in Photoshop, downsample to 8-bits, tag with metadata and enter in my asset-management database
6. File the slides in archival sleeves in binders (more convenient than boxes).

This sounds involved, but the entire process takes in well about an hour total, with minimal hand-holding during the three passes, most of the slow scanning taking place in the background. I can then make a digital contact sheet and have high-res scans (134 MB!) for the best ones. The gain in productivity over my old setup is significant, over a factor of 4 in real time, and much higher if you count the reduced drudgery of feeding slides one by one. It's like going from flipping floppies for backups to using a high-capacity Zip or CD-R drive.

Of course, you could run VueScan in fully automatic correction mode, lower quality settings and use JPEG rather than TIFF to reduce the amount of manual work involved. You would have to rescan the particularly good slides by hand to extract the maximum quality out of them.

The accessory is not perfect, however. The dust cover is held by an incredibly flimsy-looking hinge, specially considering the price. I am careful with my equipment, but I don't know how well it would hold up in a commercial production scanning environment.