Nothing suitable from Pentax, so I've gone Nikon

1700 and going strong. I don't even hear the racket the scanner makes now, it's such a part of my working environment.

Another thing I've noticed is the permanent crick in my neck I seem to have, looking at all the portrait shots displayed in landscape in Picasa. No orientation sensor in scans!!!

I'm *so* not going back to film

Pity though, you just bought a machine for that and it will be sitting on a shelve gathering dust if you don't use film.
Maybe you can get a MF to get some high quality prints!

No, it's 35mm only. And that was expensive enough. The Nikon Coolscan 9000, which can handle 120 film is about £2.5k

Once I'm done with my negs, I'm going to tout for a bit of scanning business, and if that comes to nothing, I'll sell the scanner. I haven't looked at prices since I got it, but beforehand they were going for about 80% of the new price.

A couple of hundred quid, assuming I can get back 80%, will be a small price to pay for the return of more than 20 years of memories. So far there are a couple of gems, a few reasonable pictures, and there will be a few more if I crop and edit carefully.

But ironically, it's the snaps I wanted the most.

Those are certainly priceless.

Bad news.

I've come to the end of the first book of negatives - 2100 frames.

"Phew, about half way through", I was thinking.

I've now discovered another three books. Five in all. So the total is going to be closer to 10,000 than 4,000.



Anyone got any idea how long the scanner's likely to last?

Nobody knows how long scanners last. Most people give up after a couple of hundred scans, and very few continue for as long as you have.

My guess is that it will be good for 5,000.

G

good luck Chris

Thanks!!

I think there are a few things in my favour:

- The negs are already extremely well organised. Each strip is numbered with the film number.

- My job is based at home, at the computer. So I'm here anyway.

- The workflow is a piece of cake. About 15 seconds, 20 if I'm a bit cack-handed, of effort per strip, with a bit more at the start and sometimes at the end of each film.

- Digital ICE (the dust and scratch auto-cloner-outer) is excellent. It's not always perfect, but almost all the scans would need no additional cloning, even if the pictures were good enough to bother with, which most of them aren't.

It's as simple as feed and forget. I've sorted out my backup regime to cope with large amounts of data, which I needed to do anyway. I'm going to be a bit closer to needing another terabyte or two of hard disk space than I thought, but I might be able to get round that by converting all the dross to JPG.

The only downside is that I can't really work on the whisky at the same time.

You can always get help for that.

G

Well, I should fess up, I guess, and admit to losing much of my earlier enthusiasm for this project - until today I hadn't done any scanning since 15/11 last year, after discovering that there were about 10k frames in total, rather than the 4k I originally thought.

However, I'm pleased to report that I'm going again. The scanner is working as well as ever (touch wood). If I find anything nice I may post it on my other thread, and of course people are welcome to comment as brutally on it as they like.

I hope people won't be offended if I repeat my earlier shameless plug - as I've said, it would be nice to recoup some of the outlay on the scanner, so if anyone has a few rolls of negative film that they would like to scan at high resolution, but have been stunned at the huge prices charged on the high street, do please feel free to drop me a PM.

Thanks Chris but I`ll stick to my little VEHO - a memory is a memory - however "faded or foggy "

Tony

Never mind the scanning. How's the whisky going?

G

Still quite a lot left, despite all my best, albeit somewhat sporadic efforts. Working on a Caol Ila, at the moment, amongst other things.

Some may remember my scanning project, which I've just resurrected.

I thought it may be of interest to some that the hack that allows installation of the unsupported Nikon drivers on 64 bit Windows Vista and 7, also works very well on Windows 8.1.

I can't find his original post, but I have a folder on my PC under Nikon, called SteveEveritt's Method, which contains a .inf file, and a readme.txt file.

It's without a doubt the easiest* of several ways I've come across of setting up a Nikon Coolscan 5000 on a 64 bit Windows machine, so credit and thanks to him for that. I have the files should anyone need them.

___
* Setting Windows 8.1 to allow the installation of unsigned drivers was harder.

So how many have you managed to scan so far? Good results?