Nikon Super CoolScan 5000 ED Film Scanner

Nikon's own LED illumination technology ensures accurate color separation with no warm-up time or risk of heat damage. Scan times are as fast as 20 seconds including image transfer to display, and as fast as 11 seconds in preview mode. Automatic color/contrast compensation helps you achieve accurate results, while the ICE4 advanced digital image correction suite of technologies--including digital ICE, digital ROC, digital GEM, and digital DEE--helps to restore old slides to their original glory. Additionally, the included Nikon Scan 4 software provides a comprehensive and easy-to-use interface for managing your scans.

The Super Coolscan 5000 ED has a convenient, plug-and-play USB interface, while one-touch scan and preview buttons will have you scanning film in no time. PC and Mac compatible, the Super Coolscan 5000 ED also comes backed with a one-year limited warranty.

More Features:

Scan Image Enhancer		Nikkor ED glass lens
Scan Image Enhancer provides one-touch image correction. Automatic brightness and color saturation adjustments with no complicated control settings make it easy to produce images with optimal contrast.		Scanner Nikkor ED glass lens greatly reduces chromatic aberration and image distortion, and delivers sharp images.

What's in the Box
Scanner, power cord, USB cable, MA-21 slide mount adapter, SA-21 strip film adapter, software CD-ROM (Nikonview, Nikon Scan 4), Nikon User's Guide, one-year Nikon U.S.A. limited warranty information

Product Description
Designed for use by imaging professionals, the SUPER COOLSCAN 5000 ED offers 135/IX240 film scanning at an amazing 20 seconds per image (including image transfer to display) - at 4, 000 dpi true optical resolution. Highly accurate color reproduction and representation of detail are made possible by the 16-bit A/D converter and 16-bit output channel.The SUPER COOLSCAN 5000 ED targets primarily business users such as professional photographers and photo finishers, who require superb image quality and high-speed scanning capability. Private users of 135/IX240 format cameras - advanced amateur SLR photographers, for example - will welcome the scanner's speed and image quality. Users who deal with numerous slide mounts and uncut film rolls will appreciate the increased ease of use and productivity afforded by optional accessories like the SLIDE FEEDER SF-210 and ROLL FILM ADAPTER SA-30. The SUPER COOLSCAN 5000 ED offers the performance and efficiency to make it the ideal digital archiving solution.With fast, easy image transfer thanks to the USB 2.0 interface, the SUPER COOLSCAN 5000 ED is an extremely powerful, extremely fast, extremely efficient desktop film scanner that will augment your productivity and give you scanned images that will take your breath away.

If you are like me and wondering whether you should suffer through using a consumer level slide scanner or fork out the dough for this one, then the quality this produces when scanning dark slides should be enough to convince you alone. And that's just the beginning. I've used consumer level scanners before and no amount of tweaking or photoshop'ing can match the quality the Coolscan 5000 produces. For professionals, this is of course a no brainer, but for semi-professional folks like me, this is a major investment, and I needed some convincing that it would be worth it. I am now convinced.

Don't put too much stock into the scan times (and feed times for the sf-210 auto feeder). These times are without any Digital ICE, auto exposure, auto focus, etc. However, I have found if you do not use these features, you are wasting your time. After much tweaking to get all the settings such that the final result looked just like the original slide, I am looking at about 1 minute and 30 seconds per slide using the sf-210 (AMD 2.2 Ghz 1GB Ram, scanning at 2000 dpi)

I have found that without tweaking, you get a bluish hue (although a little less so for Kodachrome slides). I have turned red up +20 and blue down +20 (green at 0) and to me, this seems to give the best results (ymmv).

Use the digital ice features!!! They are simply amazing. The dust and scratch removal is phenomenal. The grain removal is also wonderful - and it keeps the picture sharp much more so than using a software filter like those found in Photoshop. Personally, I set the Digital ROC (color restoration and correction) to 0 because it is too unpredictable.

Lastly, use a bright, high quality LCD monitor! You would be amazed at the difference this can make when doing color matching, especially on dark pictures. I was astonished to see the difference.

When you take the above into consideration, this scanner is superb. Plan on spending a few hours getting your settings just right, but after that, sit back and enjoy. I've done 8x10 prints of my slides (scanned at 2000 dpi) that are just beautiful. It is near impossible to match the luminance and beauty of a projected slide, but the Coolscan 5000 does a darn good job.


Good scanner but be aware   November 6, 2004
B. America (East Stroudsburg, PA USA)
135 out of 139 found this review helpful

I've been doing this for some time and have Nikon gear top to bottom. I have the slide feeder and the negative adapter that lets you feed full strips into it. Both work well 90% of the time. I get mis-feeds on the slides from time to time.

You will get a bluish hue on your negatives. I have tried several films and they all yield the same problem. Expect to take some time in Photoshop to correct this problem. I am taking the advice of a poster to alter my color settings to compensate.

Here is the biggest issue with this scanner. PROPERLY exposed slides scan dark. This is with Fuji 50/100/400 and Kodak. This is a known issue and you will see dozens of posts all over about this problem. Flat and dark scans that need to have the analog gain pumped up to compensate. This throws off GEM and ROC and makes the software unusable. It also washes out detail and increases grain. I contacted Nikon and they stated that Fuji has a 4th layer of emulsion that impedes scans. This is not true for slides, there is no 4th layer. End conclusion, there is a problem with the scanner design. Nikon has failed to give a reason why this is occurring other then to point the finger at someone else. If it was just my problem, I would say it was something on my end, but there are dozens of people stating the same thing on many different photo boards.

ROC and GEM are "OK". I would scan clean unless there is an obvious problem with the neg/pos that needs to be addressed. Any time you alter grain or the physical layer of the film you are altering original quality. See what you have first before changing setting across the board.

If you have any questions about this, my AOL-AIM is above as my Amazon username. This would include Nikon if the finally have a reason WHY there are issues. Overall, it's a good scanner. I would buy it again, but at least I would know what to expect and not expect it all as advertised.


Best Scanner I Ever Owned !!!   February 4, 2007
Speedo (McLeansville, NC)
41 out of 41 found this review helpful

I was skeptical that a scanner could ever reproduce what I shot on high quality slide film (ie, Provia 100F). I sold my film camera to buy a Professional Nikon DSLR and now I'm considering buying a Nikon film body again but still keeping my DSLR. The reason being is that slide film is still way better than digital and the Super CoolScan 5000 Ed makes the transition from slide to digital come true.

Your scans will actually represent what you recorded on your slides if you take the following steps. Set the resolution to 4000dpi, Digital ICE to fine, Multi Sample to 16x and Pixel Data Size to 16. It will take some time to sample a slide and your file size will be huge but if you bought expensive slide film because you take pride in your work then this is the way to go. I don't use the other scanning options other than an occasional Digital DEE set to about 10 or so to bring out highlights or shadow detail. Everything else is unpredictable and the scan takes longer. I save everything as NEF files and use Nikon Capture 4 and photoshop to tweak things. Saving as NEF gives me a true slide reproduction from which I can work from (ie, make TIFFs/JPEGs, smaller files and customize my slides without lost of the original scan). It's true these NEF files will not be recognized by Nikon Capture 4 as NEF files but recognized as a regular file.

To save time scanning, you could reduce the resolution to 2000dpi, Digital ICE set to normal, Multi Sample to 4x and Pixel Data Size to 8. These settings will produce a suitable scan that you'll be proud of.

I, too, had a steep learning curve with this scanner. I played with everything and had several hangups with this software. I read every review I could find and read every page of the manual that comes on the disk rather than the book because the disk is far more indepth. As for the software hangups, I did the following. First made sure nothing was running in my computer's background, next went into my firewall and stopped all internet activity incoming and outgoing and lastly went into the Nikon scan software and reset everything to factory defaults. It hasn't hungup once since then.

I hope this helps the frustrated users out there and for those who are thinking about buying a 5000. I do hope this helps you make up your mind. It's a bit pricey but you bought a good camera, you bought expensive slide film, put a lot of time and pride in your photography so this scanner is natural match and won't disappoint.



Not bad, but not great, either   June 18, 2007
Mark Huth
54 out of 56 found this review helpful

I've owned this scanner for about 18 months now, and also have the slide and roll feeders. I've scanned about 12,000 images during that time, both slides and negatives.

The good news is, that for well-exposed negatives or slides, this scanner is fast and does a very high quality job. The bad news is that the software is buggy, and Nikon's tech support is non-existent. There are still no 64-bit drivers.

I'm running XP-Pro on an AMD x2 4600+ ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe with 2 GB memory and around a TB of SATA disk. While scanning, one of the two CPUs is totally consumed, but this is probably because of the polled USB driver. There are 3 software errors that keep occurring. First is the well-known Nikon Scan has encountered an error and must close - sorry for trashing your data. This malfunction occurs about every 10-40 frames. It simply requires a restart of the application. It usually happens just after or during a preview setup, so the work loss is minimal, but annoying. Nikon support ignores all reports to their support site of this particular problem.

The second problem is that the scanner software simply freezes. This usually happens in multiscan mode. To recover from this requires that the scanner be power cycled and the software needs to be killed with the task manager. Nikon support has also ignored this bug report.

The third problem is that when a slide jams in the feeder, the application loses communication with the scanner and must be restarted. Not too bad, since I had to manually clear the jam, but really an indication of the poor quality of the software error handling.

The software is incomplete with the slide scanner, in that it doesn't allow a preview scan for each slide like it does for the roll/strip feeder. That is basically a software issue, although the sloppy handling and positioning of the $500 slide feeder is also in play, in that it is probably impossible to get a complete alignment of the second feed with the first. (It actually misses a bit with the strip feeder as well, although not enough to matter.

The slide feeder is a bit of a kludge. It will require some modification to get it to work reliably enough to walk away from, but after a bit of tinkering, cutting and installing a modified pressure plate, it now can feed slides that are in good condition well enough that it seldom jams.

Another problem I have is with the hardware specification - it claims a Dmax of 4.8, which is just the specification of the 16-bit A/D converter attached to the sensor. But the sensor has nowhere near that much dynamic range, so the specification is downright misleading. Because of that, this scanner continues the history of scanners having great difficulty with dense slides. While Dee helps some, the problem of the limited dynamic range of the sensor becomes readily apparent. The amount of smear across high contrast boundaries is intolerable when scanning some very nice Velvia or even Provia images. If you shoot slides for scanning, consider over-exposing by 1/2 stop or so if the subject can tolerate that.

As mentioned earlier, the multi-scan setting does not seem to work very well, due to the software crashing.

Scan image Enhancement is a totally useless piece of software. The ICE works well for dust removal, but may give some image deterioration on some Kodachromes, although most work out okay. ROC works quite well for faded images, such as pre-85 Ektachromes and older negatives. Occasional Kodachromes are also restored. But there doesn't seem to be any difference between the setting from 1-4 that I have been able to detect. And you'll get bizarre results if ROC is one and the n\image hasn't faded.
GEM is okay for grain reduction, but like most such programs it loses detail fast, so us it sparingly. Faster negatives need it, and some of the older or faster slides films also, but if you can get away without it, then don't turn it on.

Negative scanning is very good, with the colors either well-balanced or easy to correct (Reala, for example, needs some manual setting to get right). But the negatives are grainy compared to slides. So you either get dynamic range problems or grain problems. Pick your favorite imperfection. I find negatives a breeze to scan, but the ultimate quality is not quite as good as a good slide scan, provided the slide is not too dense.

So Nikon gets only three stars for this. The idea is good, but the lack of dynamic range and software problems, coupled with Nikon tech support's utter incompetence or non responsiveness turn this into a mediocre product. Unfortunately, there is nothing much better at a reasonable price. Drum or pseudo-drum scanners may be better (I wouldn't count on it, though), but I don't have 10k to invest.

You'll get as good an image quality from a comparably priced 10MP digital SLR, so unless you have a lot of old stuff to scan, this is not the way to enter the digital age at this point in time. D80, D200 and comparable Canon or Fuji DSLRs give images subjectively as good or better than the scanned images from this scanner and slide film.