Which scanner for old old slides

Has anyone here scanned a bunch of old slides and negs? The problem I'm facing is that my understanding is that the Nikon Digital Ice does not work on Kodachrome. All of my father's and brothers' slides are kodachrome, up to 30-40 years old. Does anyone here have any advise?

Should I still get the Nikon LS4000 because of its other high quality features? Or would the Cannon or Minolta do just as well at half the price?

Thanks for your help and advice!

Bill

I have used my Nikon L2000 to scan hundreds of Kodachrome slides taken back in the late 50's. I have been happy with the way ICE performed on them.

My big complaint is the LS2000 isn't supported on XP. So I left it hooked to my old Win2K computer just to scan slides. A bit pain in the butt. I feel Nikon really left us holding the bag on a $1600 scanner. I've pretty much converted completed to digital since getting the D30/1D but I have over 5000 slides here sitting in carousels.

bill710 said:

Has anyone here scanned a bunch of old slides and negs? The
problem I'm facing is that my understanding is that the Nikon
Digital Ice does not work on Kodachrome. All of my father's and
brothers' slides are kodachrome, up to 30-40 years old. Does
anyone here have any advise?

Should I still get the Nikon LS4000 because of its other high
quality features? Or would the Cannon or Minolta do just as well
at half the price?

Thanks for your help and advice!

Bill

Click to expand...

Bill, I have the canon FS4000. I have used it with vuescan on both windows xp and mac os x (10.15) with great success.

No scanner can compensate for dust on Kodacrome since Kodacrome is opaque in the infra-red spectrum. All of the dust removal techniques use an infra-red scan to overlay a "map" of the dust on the slide and use that map to limit the regions that have dust removal done to them. Vuescan supports this feature well.

I think that in terms of workflow getting a good anti-static dust removal brush would be very helpful. I purchased a "kinetronics" ( http://www.kinetronics.com/ ) "anti-static brush" from Pro Photo Supply in Portland, Oregon ( http://www.prophotosupply.com ). Now I load my four slides into the slide holder. Dust on one side, then the other and then use a "anti-static cloth" to remove any oil smudges or remnants of dust that I see remaining on the slides. Then I scan at maximum resolution, apply a dust & stratches filter in photoshop and then resize to 50%. I have been very satisfied with the results.

One thing to think about regarding canon vs. nikon is speed. I understand that because of firewire the nikon is much faster. Also consider that the nikon has an optional slide feeding attachment that will let you scan many slides at one time. Vuescan does definitely help autimate the process so that you do not have to be involved in each scan before it begins.

-Matthew Voorsanger

bill710 said:

Has anyone here scanned a bunch of old slides and negs? The
problem I'm facing is that my understanding is that the Nikon
Digital Ice does not work on Kodachrome. All of my father's and
brothers' slides are kodachrome, up to 30-40 years old. Does
anyone here have any advise?

Should I still get the Nikon LS4000 because of its other high
quality features? Or would the Cannon or Minolta do just as well
at half the price?

Thanks for your help and advice!

Bill

Click to expand...

--
Thanks
Matthew

Sorry can not help you with Kodachrome , I've used primarily
provia.
But I have hardly used Nikon Coolscan IV ED for sale.
Went completely digital and sold my EOS 3 so do not have use for
the scanner anymore.
Robert

bill710 said:

Has anyone here scanned a bunch of old slides and negs? The
problem I'm facing is that my understanding is that the Nikon
Digital Ice does not work on Kodachrome. All of my father's and
brothers' slides are kodachrome, up to 30-40 years old. Does
anyone here have any advise?

Should I still get the Nikon LS4000 because of its other high
quality features? Or would the Cannon or Minolta do just as well
at half the price?

Thanks for your help and advice!

Bill

Click to expand...

--
http://www.kingfisherphotography.com

John-G said:

My big complaint is the LS2000 isn't supported on XP. So I left it
hooked to my old Win2K computer just to scan slides. A bit pain in
the butt. I feel Nikon really left us holding the bag on a $1600
scanner. I've pretty much converted completed to digital since
getting the D30/1D but I have over 5000 slides here sitting in
carousels.

Click to expand...

Try Vuescan at http://www.hamrick.com . It supported my SCSI HP Photosmart without any drivers installed, so my hunch is it'll work with the LS-2000. You can download it off the site and try it to see if it works, and if it does you can pay to register it. Awesome program btw.