Just bought Nikon Coolscan 9000 - Memory questions

[ornate_wrasse]

I just purchased a Nikon Coolscan 9000 from Roberts Imagining after being on the waiting list for a short time. I was wondering what kind of memory requirements there are for those who use this scanner. I understand some of the files it produces are quite large and I'm afraid my computer does not currently have enough memory. I just bought an external hard drive, too, but I'm afraid it'll fill up much too quickly. I plan to scan both 35mm and medium format negatives.

I'd appreciate hearing from others what amount of memory you feel is adequate when scanning with the Nikon Coolscan 9000.

Thanks.

Ellen

 

[filmfan]

Memory or disk space? Memory is for processing speed and disk space is for storage.
I use the Coolscan 8000 (probably somewhat similar to 9000) with an old Apple computer that has 1GB memory, 200GB disk space. The memory amount works fine with photoshop, but I could certainly use more to speed things up a bit (especially with medium format scans that are over 350MB). Just buy a bunch of external HDs and you will be fine for disk space. I think you can get terabyte ones now.

 

[Jamie123]

Off the top of my head I'd say a 48 bit color Tiff from a 6x6 neg is around 500mb. However, after you edit them in photoshop you can downsample them to 24bit which reduces the file to half its size. Reduce the image size and you get an even smaller file.

 

[ornate_wrasse]

I meant to say disk space. I guess I'm just not computer literate 😱

Anyway, I recently upgraded the memory on my MacBook Pro to the maximum so I won't need any more.

Ellen

 

[kiteboy]

I have an Coolscan 8000. I shoot mainly mono and scan at 2000dpi. For a 135 36 exp film this creates a total file size of around 80 -90 mgb. Colour transparency work is 6x9 - again scanned at 2000 dpi each image comes out at around 22 mgb.

The bigest impact on performance editing in Photoshop is processor speed and ram - I have struggled with an old Mac G4 with a Sonnet 1.2ghz processor and 1.5mgb ram - it is a bit like editing in slow motion. With a current spec Mac you should have no problem editing.

For what it is worth VueScan is much better to use than the Nikon software.

Good luck

Andrew

 

[bagdadchild]

I am editing scans which are 700-800 Megabytes. I am on a Pentium 4 Windows XP with 3 GB RAM. It works fine, not ultra quick but good enough for me. Opening a scan in ACR takes roughly 20-30 seconds whereas some edits in PS may take a minute to complete. Dragging or resizing the image window in PS can easily cause the program to crash but I do only a few edits and mostly it goes fine.

 

[sahe69]

I meant to say disk space.

In that case no amount of space is overstretched, especially if you do full resolution RGB scans @ 16 bits per channel. Start looking from 1 TB disks or even 2TB. And remeber to buy backup space as well. Scanning all those frames for the second time, if things come to worst, might be too much for you.