- Joined
- Jan 16, 2006
- Messages
- 5,903
I posted something back in early November about buying a Coolscan 4000 from Adorama for only $200... which would be one of the great bargains of all time, except that it arrived non-functional! So much for "E+ condition." 
I am willing to give Adorama the benefit of the doubt, it is in excellent physical condition but it would be nice if they had completely tested it. Actually, someone familiar with them would have known immediately as the power light goes through a series of blinks as it turns out and this one was indicating a problem.
ANYway, it was so cheap that I elected to send it to Nikon for repair rather than return it to Adorama. It appears that Nikon puts a flat fee on any scanner repair, large or small - $275! Plus tax plus $25 shipping. Ouch! I cringed but went ahead with it. I figured, I'd be spending a similar amount to what they go for on eBay but I'd have one freshly cleaned and repaired and a six-month warranty to boot. Many of the ones on eBay (especially the cheaper ones) are untested, "as is", etc.
So I approve the repair and it probably goes into "parts hold" status. And stays there. And stays there. It had that status for about a month and a half, then finally got repaired. It was overnighted and I received it Christmas eve.
I've had a chance to play with it a while now - and it really is very nice! I've been using VueScan and saving raw scans at 4000 dpi - this creates massive 135 meg (!!!) DNG files which I then process in Lightroom. They are around 20-24 megapixels, and when output to 90% quality JPGs, average around 10 megs.
First ones I did were some b/w photos from my Jan 07 WDW trip. The quality is vastly better to my flatbed scans from the prints. The original scans seem a little "flat" but all detail is captured, so you just play with the curves a little to get the look you want. There's actually a lot more detail than in the prints I have.
I've done some color rolls now, and it's a little trickier to get the colors exactly right, but you have plenty of flexibility to tweak white balance and such in LR. But imagine my horror when I scanned a roll of my wife's photos from 1997 and found this photo!
I didn't even remember that the we were there for the castle cake! Oh the horror! I must have blocked it out of my mind! No wonder we didn't go back for another six years!
Here's a 100% crop of the original scan, to give an idea of the kind of detail there is at full size.
Remember that this is a 100% crop of a ~22mp original file with zero sharpening! Not bad for cheap old Kodak Gold 200. Too bad she was using a Canon AE-1 w/50mm lens. She's since come over to the Pentax side.
To sum up... I'm very happy with the quality, the file sizes are a bit overwhelming (a 36-exposure roll is slightly to big to fit on a DVD-R without RARing or ZIPing them), it's a little slow but not too objectionable (I just do other stuff while scanning), and you have to be willing to do some "processing" - they are negatives after all.
You also have to be willing to do cropping if you want every bit of photo - the software can automatically crop your photo but you use a little bit of detail from the edges, so I scan the entire thing including unused edges and then crop manually.
Now I'm considering bringing a film camera to WDW again in a couple weeks... just what I need, I'm already going to easily dwarf my collection of stuff to carry compared to the last few trips. Decisions decisions... that ol' K1000 does barely take up any room though!
I am willing to give Adorama the benefit of the doubt, it is in excellent physical condition but it would be nice if they had completely tested it. Actually, someone familiar with them would have known immediately as the power light goes through a series of blinks as it turns out and this one was indicating a problem.ANYway, it was so cheap that I elected to send it to Nikon for repair rather than return it to Adorama. It appears that Nikon puts a flat fee on any scanner repair, large or small - $275! Plus tax plus $25 shipping. Ouch! I cringed but went ahead with it. I figured, I'd be spending a similar amount to what they go for on eBay but I'd have one freshly cleaned and repaired and a six-month warranty to boot. Many of the ones on eBay (especially the cheaper ones) are untested, "as is", etc.
So I approve the repair and it probably goes into "parts hold" status. And stays there. And stays there. It had that status for about a month and a half, then finally got repaired. It was overnighted and I received it Christmas eve.
I've had a chance to play with it a while now - and it really is very nice! I've been using VueScan and saving raw scans at 4000 dpi - this creates massive 135 meg (!!!) DNG files which I then process in Lightroom. They are around 20-24 megapixels, and when output to 90% quality JPGs, average around 10 megs.
First ones I did were some b/w photos from my Jan 07 WDW trip. The quality is vastly better to my flatbed scans from the prints. The original scans seem a little "flat" but all detail is captured, so you just play with the curves a little to get the look you want. There's actually a lot more detail than in the prints I have.
I've done some color rolls now, and it's a little trickier to get the colors exactly right, but you have plenty of flexibility to tweak white balance and such in LR. But imagine my horror when I scanned a roll of my wife's photos from 1997 and found this photo!
I didn't even remember that the we were there for the castle cake! Oh the horror! I must have blocked it out of my mind! No wonder we didn't go back for another six years!
Here's a 100% crop of the original scan, to give an idea of the kind of detail there is at full size.
Remember that this is a 100% crop of a ~22mp original file with zero sharpening! Not bad for cheap old Kodak Gold 200. Too bad she was using a Canon AE-1 w/50mm lens. She's since come over to the Pentax side.
To sum up... I'm very happy with the quality, the file sizes are a bit overwhelming (a 36-exposure roll is slightly to big to fit on a DVD-R without RARing or ZIPing them), it's a little slow but not too objectionable (I just do other stuff while scanning), and you have to be willing to do some "processing" - they are negatives after all.
You also have to be willing to do cropping if you want every bit of photo - the software can automatically crop your photo but you use a little bit of detail from the edges, so I scan the entire thing including unused edges and then crop manually.Now I'm considering bringing a film camera to WDW again in a couple weeks... just what I need, I'm already going to easily dwarf my collection of stuff to carry compared to the last few trips. Decisions decisions... that ol' K1000 does barely take up any room though!
