Best of breed, but understand its drawbacks before buying

Summary
I’m an amateur photographer who shoots a couple of rolls a month. Until I bought the Coolscan, I would have film developed and printed, and I would scan the 4x6s in using a flatbed scanner. I didn’t like this method, though, because I was paying about $16 per roll for developing and printing… and never looked at the prints after they were scanned in. The scans never turned out well, either. The images were never as sharp as I wanted.

The Coolscan III has met my expectations. It saves me about $13 per roll, because I don’t need to get prints made—I just need to get the film developed. This costs about $2.50 per roll (or less). If I want a print, I can upload the scanned images to one of the many sites on the Internet that digital camera owners use. By allowing me to work directly with the negatives, I’ve improved my photography. The scanner’s great detail shows every flaw in my technique.

Hardware
After a great deal of research I bought the Nikon Coolscan III (LS-30)—I chose it because of the price, resolution, and defect removal (ICE). It’s an external SCSI device. I didn’t already have a SCSI card, so I installed the Adaptec card that was included with the scanner. Setup went fine with Windows ME and my Dell Dimension 4100. If you’re using plug-and-play, you shouldn’t have any problems.

Software
The hardware setup is actually easier than getting the software to run. If you’re one of those guys who refuses to read the manuals, I’ve got good news: there aren’t any manuals. Nikon’s minimal documentation around the scanning software applies to an older version. They include PhotoShop LE (a ‘lite’ version of the software), but they don’t give you instructions for using it with the scanner.

Well, after a few minutes of poking around I managed to get some film scanned. Maybe I’m not the brightest kid, but I’ve been using this software for about two weeks now and I’m still figuring things out. For example, you can control-click thumbnails in the NikonScan software to preview or scan multiple images simultaneously. If it tells you that in the manuals, I couldn’t find it anywhere.

Performance
Nikon says it takes about 20 seconds to scan a single frame in. That’s not what I’ve experienced—it’s typically about two to three minutes to preview an image, adjust the colors, and scan it in. You do have the option of batch scanning in an entire negative strip, and saving yourself some time. But, at some point, you’ll need to adjust and crop each image for it to be usable. The scanned images don’t automatically look like your prints, because developers automatically crop the image and adjust for under/over exposure. This is your job now, and the additional control over your image is the greatest advantage of a film scanner.

The 2800 dpi resolution creates 25MB images of about 3700x2500 pixels. There are some 4000 dpi consumer film scanners available, but I can’t imagine that the additional resolution would be useful. 2800 dpi shows the grain on the ISO 400 speed film I use. ISO 100 speed film looks much better at very high resolution, but the detail in the image is limited more by my technique than the scanner. Unless you use professional lenses, slow film and a tripod, 2800 dpi will extract every piece of detail from your film.

Color reproduction is excellent. Shadow detail could be better, but you’d have to spend more than a grand on a film scanner to do any better. The image correction (Digital ICE) is fantastic, but only works on color film. Scan in a few images with it disabled and you’ll immediately understand the benefit. If you don’t chose the LS-30, definitely choose one of the other (very few) scanners that supports ICE.

If you do buy a scanner, spend a couple hours educating yourself at http://www.scantips.com.