Nikon Super CoolScan 5000 ED Film Scanner

I'm a fairly accomplished amateur photographer. I've got film from Africa, National Parks and other places, and have now put around 500 slides and negatives through this scanner.
It's *great*.
The dynamic range is fantastic. 'Dark' images come through wonderfully. If it was unintentionally underexposed, the 16-bit color depth gives lots of room for adjustment. I was able to rescue many previously useless images and get decent digital files.
Speaking of rescues, many old family photos have rolled through my scanner, and the pleasure of saving and restoring old memories has been of great worth.
The negative strip feeder struggles with strips less than two frames long; some of my old negatives were strangely cut, and I ended up enclosing them in plastic slide frames.
At full resolution and color depth, you can generate 120MB TIFF image files from a scan. You will want lots of storage.
The only weak point of this scanner is the software. It works, but it is unintuitive and quirky. Occasionally it crashes. Nikon creates great hardware, but the team that made the software should be bludgeoned for besmirching an otherwise great product. Plus- upgrades and bug fixes, Nikon? Where are those?
For those willing to pay a little more, Silverfast can step in with something more reliable and with a few useful bells and whistles, like automatic HDR.
If you need an excellent tool for pulling 35mm film into the 21st century, this is it. It's relatively fast, is accurate on the color, the scratch/dust reduction is awesome, and it's *only* a thousand bucks. Once you're dialed in on the software, you can do wonders with those old photos.

Nikon makes great cameras but awful software and this unit relies heavily on software. The scanner is slow as can be and making pre-scan adjustments with the software tedious and time consuming. Much faster with Photoshop! Bulk scanning in not a viable option due to the time it takes per image. I had the APS attachment and it failed continuously to take the film in. I sent it back to Nikon for repairs with detailed description of what was wrong and it came back with the same problems unfixed. Tried it with different brand films and still wouldn't accept rolls. For such an expensive machine it is barely worth it. Certainly not if you don't have much time to fiddle. This is all sad as the quality of scan is clearly there, just the ergonomics of using this unit and the ridiculously produced software are a typical Japanese pain in the neck. If this cost 400$ which it should, my attitude would be different but for 1000$ this is a barely 2 star machine and a hassle at that.

I bought Nikon CoolScan 5000 ED to scan my positive and negatives. Machine scans good and sometimes perfect and before i bought it i thought it was my only need. But the scanning machine has to have a suitable software. The software they gave with the machine is really old and not user friendly. Additionally, with strip film holder, Coolscan automaticaly takes the strip but can not recognize the exact frame on the strip. Sometimes it stops the strip in the middle and shows one half from previous photo and one half from the next photo. Despite these unquality things the scanning performance is great.

Except for being slow it is a great product. I found that is takes a very long time to scan and save pictures. Although I am still learning, most slides came out much better than other methods of sanning I have used.

Pros
Best scanner for the money
Fastest high resolution film scanner currently on the market (as of 2008)
Allows you to use your old 35mm as a 19+MP camera
Digital ICE and other corrective extras are great on most images
Works with C-41 process B&W negs

Cons
Expensive
Fastest is still slow, especially since ICE is usually necessary and slows the process down
Does not work with regular B&W negs
Has problems giving proper tone and shadows on some slides, mostly Kodachrome

Conclusion: Good or bad, it's about the best you can get if you need to convert your old negs and slides and don't have thousands of dollars to get something better.

This is my second Nikon scanner. I used to own the LS2000 which was excruciatingly slow and tedious to use. The results were great, yes, but the length of time it took to scan was too long for me. I also really didn't have the hard drive space for storing the huge files. Back then you didn't have hundreds of gigs at your disposal.

I purchased the 5000 because I needed the highest possible resolution and quality within a reasonable price range. If you want better you're probably looking at a drum scanner that costs a whole lot more.

Thankfully, the 5000 is considered one of the faster 35mm scanners you can get. But if you're new to film scanners, plan on waiting. The best to expect is about 30 seconds without any use of ICE or other corrections to the image. In my experience, ICE is always necessary which means the estimated times given by Nikon (under 30 seconds) are overly optimistic at best. I scanned fresh negatives after being developed and they still required ICE. The scanner just picks up every single detail - which is both good and bad.

I use an Intel Mac and overall everything works fine. Ditto what others have said about Nikon's software which is indeed buggy. It's crashed a few times on my computer. However, it's always up and running fine after I restart it (the program, not the computer). Have not tried VueScan yet, but it's something I'm looking into.

I wasted several hours when I first got the scanner trying to find the ideal setting for my work - negatives and slides that go back more than 25 years. They have dust on them and some of them have minor scratches. With that in mind, I strongly recommend the following settings to anyone in a similar situation:

Use ICE on every scan. Start with normal setting at first and go up to "fine" if the image still has flaws.
Enable "post processing" and put ROC at zero (don't typically need it) and GEM at maximum (for grain) for negs. In my experience no more than level 1 for grain is necessary for slides and you might not even need it at all. Negs, however, must have it unless you want a grainy image.

These settings have worked with the majority of my negs and slides.

EDIT: After doing several hundred negs/slides I've discovered that some do need additional help. Digital cameras tend to have highly saturated images and 35mm looks flat in comparison. ROC can boost the colors if they're flat. (If they're already vibrant it will distort them.) I've also encountered a few images that needed DEE (for shadows), but these were images that were inherently flawed to begin with. Keep in mind that the more options you choose (ICE, ROC, GEM and DEE) the longer the scan takes. Check all four and you're looking at a couple of minutes.

A major plus and two major minuses to keep in mind:

This scanner WILL work great with C-41 based B&W film. Because it reads it as color the ICE function works just like it does with color. I was extremely thankful for that.

The scanner's ICE function will not work with regular B&W film. Unfortunately, B&W film is extremely prone to scratching and major flaws that show up when they're scanned. I found major scanning services online that actually refuse to deal with B&W negs because there's so much post-scanning (Photoshop) work involved to make the image look good. Why some company hasn't come up with a solution for this is baffling given the popularity and abundance of B&W film, especially by pros and semi-pros. In any case, I've tried to scan my B&W negs and the end result is horrible. I'm looking at a couple hours of work per image on Photoshop.

The scanner also has a hard time with Kodachrome slides. I've tried several and the scanner does a rather poor job and recreating the true colors of the image, especially in the shadows. Overall, it tends to severely darken these images in my experience. I'm still researching to see if there's a setting fix for this within the software.

This scanner will turn your 35mm camera into the equivalent of a 19+MP camera. The basic setting 8 bit depth scans are about 60MB (tiff, not jpeg) and almost 120MB when you go to 16 bit. This isn't that helpful to anyone who just wants an 8X10, but it's extremely important if you're trying to do commercial work. Online stock photo agencies, for example, want 50+MB files.

This scanner will allow you to keep using 35mm for now. If you can afford a Nikon D300 or better than definitely make that leap and never look back. But if you need this scanner anyway to upgrade your old negs and slides, this will allow you to use that older equipment for a bit longer. I know I have an old 35mm 1:1 macro lens that I still enjoy using and now I can with the help of this scanner.

The two other scanners I contemplated were the less expensive Nikon CoolScan V and Epson Perfection V700 and 750. I chose the 5000 over the V because it was faster - very important given how many scans I need to do. And the Epson became a non-choice after reading about how much trouble those models have with focusing. If you want to spend less and don't have many negs or slides to scan then get the Nikon V. The far more expensive Nikon 9000 is only worth it if you have medium format film. Otherwise there's no reason to pay more for that model.