Review: Nikon Coolscan V ED - Still Awesome!
| 9 min read
First, as always, the story. Scroll down for my 'review'.
As a film shooter I've been struggling a lot lately with getting my images converted to digital. I have tried two scanners, the Epson Perfection V500 and the Plustek 7500i and while both get reasonably good reviews online, I was not having any luck getting quality scans from them. I'm sure it's operator error but even at low resolutions the scans were not even half as sharp as the source film and once scanned it took me a long time to process each image to have good color and contrast (let alone getting the scanner to help clean up dust and scratches). I was getting pretty discouraged and wondering if I should really still be shooting film at all. I was looking around online and people with the same scanners as I have were getting great results that looked nothing like mine. They were all talking about curves used and a series of tweaks performed in Photoshop or other software and frankly, I'm not that kind of photographer. I want to be shooting, not processing. Lots of people love the digital end of photography but I am not one of them. I want scanning to be easy. I want to be able to press a few buttons and have scans that look.. you know.. like the film I shot.
One of my habits though, being a geek and cheap, is to check a few listings on my local Craiglist site every day or so. I was looking over the photography section and some guy not too far from me was offering the above mentioned Nikon scanner for well under it's market value. This is not all that uncommon on Craigslist so I did what I always do: I sent the guy an email offering him 25% less then he advertised the item as. I sent off the message expecting that, as usual, it would be some spammer who wanted me to mail him money. To my great surprise though, he emailed back and accepted my offer! I was shocked. Here I was, getting ready to plunk down more cash for a pretty high end film scanner when I was thinking film was a dead end for me.
