Anyone have any feedback on Nikon Coolscan 5000 versus the Pacific Image Powerslide 3650
I have a large pro library to scan and may need to do batch scans.
I realise the Nikon is highly rated but its very expensive if you add a feeder unit. I mean how good is the Pacific anyhow?
I was reading in the CEO's Blog at scancafe.com. They use the Nikon Coolscan 5000 but do not use the feeder. They've done ten million 35mm frames to date without damage to one frame. He says in the blog that their test showed they could not scan a million frames with no damage using the feeder.
I know first hand that the Nikon scanner will pull all the detail from the film. Quality is such that my lens, film and how careful I was when I took the shoot are the weak link. When I first started my scanning project I thought I'd have to scan everything at 4,800 DPI but I quickly found that only my best shots, taken in fine grain Velia or Kodachrome 25 using a tripod, good optics and very clear air require 4800. Most frames 3,000 is more then enough and anything shot on 400 ISO color negs, 3,000 is almost overkill. The hard part is color balance. Getting color negative to look right on screen is a bit of an art with every change of film type and light being different. Automation can help but it's not perfect.
How many 35mm frames do you have? when you figure in your time and the cost of equipment it could be quite expensive to scan them yourself. It really does take about 3 to 5 minutes of your time per image because you have to do at least some minor Photoshop work to each frame. You just can't go 100% full automatic. At the very minimum you will have to quality check each frame and likely at least look at a histogram to check shadow and highlight details and color balance and when you are there it is hard to avoid making a small correction. And then there is dust and scatches that the ICE system misses (ICE gets only about 80% to 90% of the way there automatically.)
You can outsource this for a cost of about $250 to $500 per thousand frames. So if you only have a few thousand frames you can send it out but if you are going to do 200,000 then it would be good to set up your own lab but remember at 3 minutes per frame that is 20 per hour. If you have to pay someone or if you value your time at even $10/hr outsourcing sounds good, even for 200K frames.
Don't think you can beat the 3 minute per frame rate either. That is a very productive speed if you care at all about quality.
