9 out of 9 people found this review helpful.
Not great for massive jobs, buggy Mac software
Date of Review: May 14, 2005
The Bottom Line: OK but clumsy, buggy software
I've been using the CoolScan V ED for about a month. Since I've switched to a digital camera and I'm now making my own prints, I want to digitize all my negatives so I can archive them to DVD and throw away the bulky film. I've been taking 35mm pictures for 25 years, but I'm not a pro. Most of my film is 100 to 400 ASA.
The scanner itself (the hardware) is fine. The image quality is acceptable to very good. My problems are all with the software. I'm using the PhotoShop Nikon Scan plugin that came with the scanner, with Photoshop Elements 2.0, on a Mac running OS X 10.3.5. Here are the problems:
1. I'm selectively doing thousands of scans. For each and every picture, I have to manually set the cropping and digital enhancement options I want. You can create option sets and pick them again from a popup menu, but I have to make a choice from two menus for every frame. I wish I could specify the default cropping and enhancement options so all I had to do was select which frames I want and click Scan.
2. The scanner software crashes regularly, taking all the scans from that batch--which I haven't had a chance to save--with it. I'd estimate it crashes every 10 to 15 scans. I'm now shutting down the Nikon Scan plugin and saving after every roll I scan, and I still have to restart Photoshop and power the scanner on and off every 3 or 4 of rolls.
3. The positioning to the frames on the strip is erratic; every dozen times or so it's off by about 5 to 10%.
4. The preview area is a fixed size that's not large enough to get precise positioning. Therefore I have to crop every scanned frame, which is why I run the scanner as a plugin in Photoshop. (I also adjust the levels on almost every picture; I don't think this is a problem with the scanner.)
The scanner is working, I'm pleased with the final results, but it's a lot more time-consuming than if I could set the default scan options and if it would stop crashing.
Addendum: one month later, I've learned more about the product.
1. The stand-alone Nikon Scan 4 software is much more stable than the Photoshop plug-in; it's only crashed half a dozen times in a month.
2. You can set the preferences so the files get saved immediately when the scan completes, so even if it crashes you've only lost the last frame scan.
3. You can select more than one frame and apply the same saved settings to all of them at once; that saves some time.
