Excellent quality. Produced much better images than any digital camera I tried. Digital ICE is extremely useful.

Tend to be more grainy, probably due to the use of LEDs as light source.
Nikonscan software is not very useful.

I scanned more than 100 rolls of film since I bought it abut 12 months ago. It performed flawlessly. Vuescan is a must if you want to extract the most out of it. Multipass scan is only possible with Vuescan, which effectively turn the LS30 into a LS2000.

Similar Products Used:

HP Photosmart S20

Digital ICE works great. The scanner itself is very robust.

Way overpriced. Grain is accentuated. Dynamic range is lower than cheaper scanners.

The Nikon LS-30 used to be a good scanner in its day. It has been superseded by much cheaper scanners like the Minolta Scan Dual-II and Acer ScanWit offering better noise characteristic in shadow area, and better specs. It is too expensive for what it is.

Customer Service

-

Similar Products Used:

Minolta Scan Dual-II, Acer ScanWit 2720, HP S20

Digital ICE works extremely well. Robust mechanical build.

Nikon software ditched after a few days in favour of VueScan. Could be faster.

I'm very happy with it. No problems so far after feeding some 100+ films through it from my old 35mm negative collection.

Customer Service

Not needed.

Similar Products Used:

None - first neg scanner.

Nicely made. When used with Vuescan (www.hamrick.com) the results for most films are excellent. Vuescan will give multipass scanning at the expense of hugely increased scan times. ICE works and only degrades the image slightly: insignificant for 6 by 4 prints.

Poor software. (Use Vuescan instead.) Has trouble with Kodachrome due to speckle noise and flare/bleed. Can only take one slide at a time. Despite claims by some, ICE does not work on Kodachrome (it removes detail).

A nice scanner. If you don't want greater than 12 by 8 prints, and don't scan Kodachrome, then this scanner is the business. Expect price drops when the Coolscan IV is released.

Customer Service

Arrogant but helpful.

Similar Products Used:

Canon FS2710, Microtek Artixscan 4000T

Good quality, good noise level in dark areas. Makes great scans.

ICE, no ICE, what's the difference ?
Extremely buggy software (had to reinstall several times after loosing icons and buttons at random). Real pain to use their tiny user interface 'design' on large screen.

Good but expensive and just plain bad software.

Customer Service

Never answered my email about loosing the icons/buttons. Found the answer after several hours on their website.

Similar Products Used:

Canon Canoscan 2700 (extremely noisy dark areas, and even clear ones). HP 20.

Great scans with ICE working - with it off you notice the dust immediately

Terrible software - 2.51 and all

I had so many problems with the software I sent the unit back. Nikon was not able to solve my software problems - I'm running Windows ME and it got so bad I couldn't get 2 slides copied before it crashed. Unit works great - software doesn't.

Customer Service

Very frustrating to deal with. Expect hour long waits on the phone.

Similar Products Used:

None

Digital ICE
Sharp images
Fast scan
Very robust
Automatic feeder than handles 6 images per strip

Expensive
Noise in dark areas

I bought it about 2 years ago as my first film scanner although I did try an HP-20. Overall I like it and have scanned about 200 rolls to date. I use exclusively Vuescan.

As I indicated above, it was not cheap, but compared to a high end digital camera, it is not expensive at all.

The major weakness is noise in dark areas. I am extremely careful in handling that. I even gave up sharpness for lower noise. That's why I am wondering the noise performace of LS-40 and LS-4000.

Similar Products Used:

None