ryan26
Established
Been scanning B&W with Nikon scanners and a Mac for almost 15 years now and this is what I've learned. High contrast negatives are going to give you clipping. My original Coolscan III clipped B&W negs pretty badly, negatives that I could print in the darkroom with no problem, clipped with the Coolscan III.
A Nikon tech gave me a good piece of advice: Everytime I open NikonScan, I first trash the .plist Nikon Maid preference and start over. He said there is this glitch in NikonScan where after a certain number of scans of B&W the software/scanner combination starts to go very high contrast. Which produces alot of clipping.
I then acquired a Coolscan 5000, and although it was better than the Coolscan III for B&W, it still clipped quite a bit if the negatives weren't lower contrast. Still kept using the "trash preferences" thing each time before I opened NikonScan.
Then I finally got a Coolscan 9000, and the difference between it and the 5000 was quite noticeable. Like the difference between a condenser enlarger (the 5000) and a diffusion enlarger (the 9000). I still trash the preferences before launching NikonScan each time, and I have a computer that will be stuck running Snow Leopard, because as noted above, Lion won't run NikonScan and Nikon refuses to update it. But I now get glorious B&W scans from my negatives and am quite happy with the set up.
Tried Vuescan a number of different times and never saw an improvement over NikonScan.
Best,
-Tim
thank you thank you thank you