Everything I wanted from a scanner... and more

I have a large collection of (mostly) 35mm transparencies. Now, having gone digital, I wanted to scan the slides. I'm a perfectionist... and worried that the scans wouldn't look as good as the originals. Well, they don't... they look better! It's great to be able to make minor crops, rotations, colour tweaks, etc (and restore colour from some slightly faded slides).

The Nikon scanner is very simple: there's just an on/off switch. Everything else is controlled from the computer. Everything just works, and I'm gobsmacked at the way the ICE technology gets rid of dust and scratches. My worries were unfounded; it's a terrific piece of kit...

Should be in the box!

An essential"accessory" if, like most photographers, you've got odd, single 35 mil negs. Works like a dream.
My only issue is, when you pay over £500 for a film scanner why can't you get this relatively cheap accessory included as standard?

unnecessary unless doing big volume and then not robust enough

if you're just scanning a handful of films you're better off winding the neg out of the aps cartridge with a biro and then scanning it as you would 35mm.
you will have to mask it down with photoshop if you don't like the look of the whole film but prints including this as a border can look great in my opinion.
save your dough. this is a piece of expensive plastic.

Great time saver

A real boon if you have a lot of slides to scan, this attachment for the LS-5000 scanner works pretty well and saves hours. Setting up is simple - you just slot it into the front of the scanner, which has to be lying in the horizontal position. It takes 50 slides and there is a slightly fiddly adjustment for thickness of mount - so it's best not to mix thin and thick in the same batch.

It worked faultlessly with plastic mounts but old card mounts quite often got stuck - this is a pain because resetting the scanner scrambles the Nikonscan software so you have to quit and restart. I finally figured out the problem - the inner edge of the mount of the slide being loaded catches on the opposite inner edge of the next slide: this is caused by slight splaying of the mounts. A solution which worked most of the time is to put a smooth rectangular object, about 1 x 1 x 4 cm (I used a handy artist's graphite block) upright between the sprung slide pusher and the last slide, on the side away from the scanner. This asymmetric pressure flares the stack of slides on the far side so they don't catch.

The scan software otherwise works fairly well and saves the images in a numbered series. You have to make any decisions in the scan options before you start a batch as you cannot change them between slides - if necessary you have to cancel the series, often quit & restart the software and start again, remembering to choose the right number to continue saving the images.

In summary, a few glitches but well worth the hassle as it's such a brilliant scanner.

Jonathan Charles (http://www.jonathancharlesphoto.com)