I did, so don't hold back!!
That's exactly what I want, and is all the recommendation I need.

You realise you'll now probably get a lot of daft questions from me in the near future, don't you?
Cheers!
The tanker is booked

Thanks (and thanks, John, too)!
No. I'm dreading it. But it's my whole life, pretty much. Most will be snaps, just memories I want back, but who knows, there may be a few good pictures in amongst the dross.

I'm not looking forward to the terabytes of hard disk I'll need to buy as well, not to mention the Vuescan software, which by all accounts is a huge improvement on Nikon's offering.

Well I've looked long and hard. Microglobe used to stock them as did Warehouse Express, but they've been out of stock for ages. There was that dodgy place that came up here recently (can't remember the name) that allegedly had some, too cheap to be true - I wasn't going to touch them with a bargepole.

So now that it's been officially discontinued, at least in Europe, it seemed to me that the chance of getting a new one from the UK was very remote.

The image quality, basically, and the speed (it's a lot faster than the Coolscan 5). Pretty much everything I read suggests that it's simply the best for 35mm dedicated scanners, albeit expensive.

I guess I'll find out...

If George can pick attention-grabbing headlines, I don't see why I shouldn't!

Not a camera - a scanner. After an enormous amount of indecision, which I now regret, since delaying has cost me a bucket of money, I've ordered a Nikon Coolscan 5000 ED from Adorama in the USA.

It hasn't arrived yet, but I thought I'd post about it now for two reasons. One, to start a sort of blog about my scanning experiences (although I won't be offended by any scanning related discussion points that come up from others here).

And two, to make slightly better known the fact that this scanner and its less expensive litter-mate, the Coolscan 5 ED, have, as far as I can tell, been discontinued, and very few places have any new in stock. They're being snapped up at quite a rate too, from what I gather from my email exchanges with Adorama, and are going for crazy money on eBay at the moment.

From all the reading I've done, the most common view (if not universally held) seems to be that the Coolscan range is the best for dedicated scanning of colour negatives, of which I have some 4000 dating back to 1984 when I got my first camera - a Pentax Super A. I have none of the prints, however, so effectively my whole adult life is hidden away in a pile of negative folders in a cupboard.

I'm not getting any younger (age-wise at least), so since 4000 negs will take a while to scan, I need to get cracking. Also, I'm hoping that the resale value of the scanner stays high, so that even if it all turns out to be a horrible labour-intensive mistake, I'll get back a fair bit of what I spent.

So far, Adorama have been quite helpful - they seem to have a reputation in the USA equivalent to SRS' here, and they've been willing to do an 'exception pick' for me to check that everything is Ok in the box. Apparently they've added additional packing for me, to protect it in transit.

I'll post more when it arrives - but in the meantime, please keep your fingers crossed for me, that it arrives in one piece, works, and continues to work! There will be a couple more lenses hitting the classifieds in the near future to bridge the rather large gap between what was already in my PayPal account and what it's cost me.

I do agree that it's a confusing term!

'Crop' isn't the part that's ambiguous - it just means that you've chosen some part of the original image, chopped that out and saved it as an image in its own right.

It's the '100%' that's troublesome.

The point is, it's 100% of the pixels, not of the size.

Take this image, for instance. It is not a crop, and had to be reduced substantially from its original 3872 pixels wide, since it would have been far too large for display. The whole frame looks like this:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Aviation/Farnborough%202008/IMGP0652.jpg[/IMG]

An example of a 100% crop is this one:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Aviation/Farnborough%202008/IMGP0652-cr1.jpg[/IMG]

It's a portion of the image, but it contains 100% of the pixels in that section of the original photograph.

It's the usual way of displaying the maximum amount of available detail in the original image, since in the absence of any browser-resizing, one pixel on the sensor ends up corresponding to one pixel on the screen.

They're very easy to do - just crop out a small enough piece of the original for it to fit comfortably in the browser without resizing - a max 800 pixels on the longest side is the convention here. It will display at full size (ie, one image pixel to one screen pixel) in an [IMG] tag without you needing to do anything special at all.

I think the answer to George's question depends on how good you are at editing, and how much money you have to spend.

You might take a fantastic picture, but not be skilled enough to edit it to get the best out of it. If you could afford it, it would make sense to have a PhotoShop expert do it. Obviously, you'd make your creative intention clear to them, and if you didn't like their services you'd sack them and hire someone else.

It's no different from D&P in that respect. In the good old days, I didn't like Max Spielmann, so I tried Bonusprint. I didn't like their enlargements much, so I sent my best negs to Colab. I never did any B&W.

The main difference now is that we all have a computer, and the entry barrier to digital PP is so much lower - there's no need for a darkroom, or expensive chemicals and paper. So we have a go, and improve to a level where we can do most of what we want reasonably quickly, and if we muck it up, we just chuck it away and the only cost of another go is time.

I think it's much the same debate as digital photography versus film. For the majority, a reasonable level of skill is much more accessible than it used to be, and I think that applies to PP too.

Ah, bait and switch.. nice one, John.

Don't panic!

Personally, I don't like a frozen prop.

I don't tend to go any faster than 1/250s, myself.

At 1/320s, for instance, I think you're really pushing it.

Even 1/250s is a bit fast, sometimes.

I bet John's getting ready to lock this thread...

No you're not...

No, if you look at the post times, you can see that from 20:22 (first post) to your last (at 21:26), it's one hour and four minutes.

Therefore I'm arguing in my spare time.