Fast, good software, excellent image quality - a professional product.

Price paid.

After many years outside the darkroom - I finally dicided to give digital darkroom a try. I first tested a Minolta scanner that gave poor results - not worth the effort acctually. The expensive Nikon 4000 has been worth every penny! Amasing quality - both on B&W and color possitive and negative. Scanned and ink-jet-printed photos have acctually often better quality than my old chemical copies. Have had no problem with the software NiconScan 3.1.2. have also tried the supplied Silverfast - which might be even better. Highly recommended!

Similar Products Used:

Minolta Scan dual

Good quality scans¡

They break down all tthe timeÅ

I''ve had a LS-2000 for years and it has been in the shop at least 4 or 5 times. Sometimes with the locking screw error; sometimes because it would not focus. Well, it died yet again the other day and I bought a 4000 ED figuring Nikon must have fixed the inherent weaknesses of the 2000. They didn''t. Out of the box my 4000 ED focused some of the images some of the time and some were so out of focus it wasn''t funny. I have several Nikon cameras and it is unbelievable how much film I''ve run through them with very few problems. They''re great. When it comes to scanners, however, Nikon does not have their act together. When they work they produce nice scans but they break down much too much.

Similar Products Used:

Nikon LS-1000; Nikon LS-2000

Accurate color (when using the right color space), good dynamic range for negatives.

Many. Poor dynamic range for positives, GEM malfunctions with Scanner RGB space (the best one for positives), very narrow depth of field (difficult to hold corner-to-corner sharpness; you just have to compromise), all scans too dark, ICE/GEM cause blurring on textured subjects, various operational bugs.

A dual personality scanner: some great features (when they work), but terrible software. I pushed the scanner pretty hard, used every feature, tried a variety of negatives & positives. After two months of daily battles, I returned it to my dealer.

Customer Service

Level 1-okay, Level 2-fair, Level 3-terrible (e-mail only, wait a week).

Similar Products Used:

Drum scans, Minolta Elite

Along with the roll film and multi-slide adapters, the unit does everything I need to do in terms of automated scanning. The images are incredibly sharp and I can make spectacular prints (up to 11 by 17 on my HP 1220C)

Haven''t found any yet, although as with anything, it would be nice if it were 10 times faster.

I have been using this product for about 9 months now, and have nothing but good things to say about it. I have already scanned many thousands of negatives with it and it only crashed once or twice at the beginning. Probably something I did. I use it mostly with an HP N5195 laptop (700 Mhz, 128 megs RAM) to which I''ve added a firwire PCMCIA card. I shoot a lot of weddings for friends and other events (sports and dance) and scan 30 to 50 rolls/month. Obviously, I had to purchase the roll film adapter (SA-30) and also got the slide feeder (the only downside is the 2 adapters cost almost as much as the scanner did). However, the unit would not be much use to me without these adapters. I have this unit scanning film virtually 24 hours/day which I get developed uncut. It takes about 1.5 hours to scan a roll of 36 but since I don''t need to monitor the operation, it is quite painless. I then have Adobe photoshop do a number of activities to all of the negs at once (cropping, rotating, and saving as smaller files in a separate directory for easy viewing). I use an 80 GByte external Firewire Maxtor drive for saving my negatives until I''ve finished working with them. Then I burn them to CD''s. Initially, I purchased a Minolta Dimage Scan Elite and quickly realized that it wasn''t suitable for the kind of work I do. I could only scan 4 negatives at a time and it was very time consuming to mount them in the holder etc. (That unit just sits in my basement now). Also, I didn''t find the software as easy to use as Nikon''s. Basically, I''ve found this unit to be an excellent bridge between the negative world and digital (I''m not quite ready to spring for a D1x and have thousands of negatives and slides I want to digitize).

Similar Products Used:

Minolta Dimage Scan Elite F2900

Firewire is fast, no problems with setup besides software and XP. Scans are very, very good

Software, Nikon seems to not put that much inti it

Had used a Minolta DiMage, this is quite a bit better. The Nikon software is not very good. Down load at Hamrick.com the Vuescan program. I am running XP which Nikon does not support, used Vue Scan and then loaded Silverfast AI5 and it worked fine as a plug in for Pagemaker 6. As a standalone the Vuescan software is great and it is 0 to $40

Customer Service

None

Similar Products Used:

Minolta Dimage Scan elite F-200 and an HP slide/film/4/6print scanner (forgot model)

The best I''ve ever seen, nothing but quality.

Slow, using all of the extra features. Software needs more work.

My initial reaction to the Coolscan 4000 ED is very positive. It´s my fourth film scanner and it consistantly produces the best results. The ice-feature is great and roc/gem is a sending from god, when dealing with old or faded films. The software is impressive but needs some GUI improvements. It''s pretty stable (version 3.1), but the Photoshop plug-in occasionally crashes on my 3 year old B/W G3/400. Background scanning is a nice thing to have, but if you use post processing (roc/gem), then, my computer at least, crawls almost to a halt, making any productive work almost impossible. I tend to scan using max resolution (4000 ppi), 14 bit, with ice normal and gem(2-4). Ice and gem occationally produce extra artifacts, but most of the time this setting works best for me. Scannig times are fast, but using all of the above extras really slows things down, in fact it takes my computer exactly 15 minutes to produce a single scan using the post production features mentioned above. But the results are worth it. I would recommend this scanner to any serious film buff, but if you are looking just to scan the occational picture, get something less expensive.

Customer Service

Not used it

Similar Products Used:

Epson 2000, Minolta Dual, Minolta Elite

Sharp, fast, lots of control over scans.

BUGGY SOFTWARE!

I had LOTS of problems using this with Corel PhotoPaint (Windows version 9, and 10 with service packs). I downloaded 3.1 still didn''t help. The scans looked terrible and it crashed a lot. That wwas using it in Twain mode. Then I remember the stand alone Nikon Scan and life took a turn for the better. Scans now look the same as they in preview and I''m very impressed. Still crashes on me sometimes but not nearly as much as when used through PhotoPaint. Most of my old slides are Kodachrome and ICE doesn''t work with them (scans blur badly).

Customer Service

Haven''t tried it.

Similar Products Used:

Microtek Scanmaker 35t & 35t plus.

*FireWire Connection
*Very Sharp Scans
*Scans up to 4000Dpi
*Noise and Fade Correction

*You need lots of RAM
*Need good photoshop skills to use well
*Works with win98SE and above

I upgraded from the LS2000. The firewire is easier to set up and maintain than SCSI. You can get up to a 100MB file if you choose 12 bit color. I compared scans with the LS2000. The new 4000 is slightly sharper. The main advantage is the 4000 dpi which will allow for very large prints as well as large crops into the negative. With this scanner and a epson photoprinter, you can do better than most labs (even pro).

Customer Service

Excellent phone support

Similar Products Used:

LS2000

Very compact and lightweight. Quick Scans and incredibly sharp. Default size of scans are a remarkable 65MB. 4000dpi is impressive in 35 seconds. The scans are on par with the drum scans I often get and are better in some cirmcumstances. I don't expect anybody to match this scanners quality at this price for quite some time.

Scans are generally dark. If you know what you doing with Photoshop levels and curves then this is not a problem.

Amazing scanner. Trust me when I say this is a significant advancement in desktop slide scanning technology. Considering what I pay for professional drum scans, this scanner will pay for itself in one year.

Similar Products Used:

None

Excellent scan quality, great hardware (FireWire connection is a nice change from SCSI), easy to setup, Digital ICE products are truly amazing.

Windows software is very buggy. Individual features work well but entire program crashes regularly. I'm using Windows 2000. I tested it on a Mac and it worked perfectly.

Wonderful scans; bad Windows software.

Customer Service

Great: although Nikon TS didn't have any immediate answers (it's a new scanner ,after all), they were very eager to get system details. I'm confident they'll update the software soon.

Similar Products Used:

Imacon Flextight II, Kodak RFS 3600