Nikon Reviews

This is so annoying that I have to buy an extra piece of equipment before I can use my new lens.

This item is necessary for the Nikon Coolpix 880 if you want to use any of the Nikon Converter Lens accessories, such as the FC-E8 Fisheye Converter Lens, the WC-E63 Wide Angle Converter Lens, TC-E2 2x Tele Converter Lens, or the TC-E3ED 3x Tele Converter Lens. It is also needed for the Slide Copying Adapter (for shooting 35mm format positive or negative film).

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.

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 750 I wanted to scan. After culling my own slides I ended up with another 200 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 and some bad news. The ICE4 does work, however, inconstantly with Kodachrome slides producing unacceptable artifacts in about 5 - 10 percent of the slides. It is a hit or miss proposition. 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 stumped by old Kodachrome slides where subjects were wearing shirts with stripes. Those stripes were really butchered by the ICE feature.

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.

The good news: 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. 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 pit marks that magically are erased by the ICE feature. What a godsend. I only wish it had worked so flawlessly on the Kodachrome slides. 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.

I can recommend this scanner without reservation. It is a phenomenal piece of equipment.

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 ;)