Nikon Reviews

Do you need the SF-200? The question is, are you going to scan a whole batch of slides? Or are you scanning a few slides? Do you have the time and patience to hand-feed all the slides you will scan?

For batch work, the SF-200 is absolutely essential, like the ICE Cubed software that comes with the Coolscan 4000 ED. WITH these two powertools, you can quickly capture and enhance thousands of slides quickly.

Does the SF-200 work perfectly? No. It jams now and then. That's too bad, because since it jams from time to time, I am constantly checking and listening to make sure it doesn't.

Does the ICE cubed software work perfectly? Nearly. It works wonders on old, scratched, poorly lit slides. But in it's quest to clean up and color balance your ancient slide collection, it sacrifices a bit of sharpness. Some people prefer to leave the heavy processing off, and then rescan the problem slides. That's what I do. It saves time, and gets good results. But my favorite photos have been enhanced with ICE3 in a way that would be nearly impossible for all but the most talented Photoshop artists.

You will probably want to dust off your slides before you scan them. You can do this with a 1" camel's hair brush, and/or a couple of cans of pressurized air. Beyond that, if your slides have fingerprints, or other material on them, you can clean that with PEC-12 photographic emulsion cleaner and a lint-free cloth. PEC-12 is from Photographic Solutions, Inc. in Buzzards Bay, MA. This powerful cleaner dissolves goey junk on the slide, but not the slide film! Use it for you problem slides. That's what I know about pre-cleaning (which the Nikon manual does not mention).

For my purposes - scanning thousands of old slides - the SF-200 and ICE cubed are ESSENTIAL to my use of the Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 ED. If you need to scan batches of images, get the SF-200. Ebay it when you're done.

You can load 50 35mm slides into this feeder and just let the scanner run while you do other work. Given, working on other applications while the scanner is going is really slow, but if you need to do so, you can!

Every once in a while, the feeder will jam, but it is extremely easy to follow the instructions to unjam it. The possibility of jamming increases if the slide has a damaged cardboard mount, or a really thick plastic mount.

Here's a hint, number your slides in pencil before you scan, and you will be able to double check your work easier.

Fantastic flash- very versitile. The various auto and TTL modes are much cleverer than I. Works supurbly with my D100. The only complaint I have is that you may need to sell a car to buy one. Otherwise this product is a 5.

I bought the Speedlight to take to Europe with a new D100. It worked fantastic. I was able to light the ceilings of every church and castle we visited. The light is bright and very fast. The color digital image was true to the actual color - no yellow tinge at all. Close-ups were great. NO red-eye on any shot and no washed out images. I took about 1200 pictures and used the Speedlight on about 500 of them. Everyone was perfect. Took the shadows right out of the pictures in bright sunlight. There should be no doubt about whether it is worth the dollars - it is every one of them.