Picking a Nikon CoolScan

[agi]

PrebenJaeger: Nikon makes good scanners. But do not blindly exclude all the other manufacturers like Minolta who also make good (in my mind better) products.

Agree with this as I recommended the Dimage above.

 

[PrebenJaeger]

Thanks for all your inputs.

The main reason for picking CoolScan is because of the availability. Haven't been able to find anything Minolta.

 

[Archlich]

The $700 I spent buying a "for parts" 4000ED plus a then new SA-30 from Adorama a decade ago was the best $700 I'd ever spent on photography. Scanned some 25,000 frames since then.

No complain in quality. But even with the SA-30 that enables whole-roll scanning, it is slow! Haven't timed it but feels like 50-80 min for a roll. With the SA-21 you'd factor in extra time to change strips.

 

[James1]

I would go further than Bob - in my opinion, 10,000 images will drive you mad, will take a long time, and I think you might find yourself resenting the process instead of enjoying the gems that you find.

I recently had a similar dilemma, and I ended up giving my family archive (around 2,500 negatives and slides in rolls and strips) to a specialist shop to scan on their Frontier. It didn’t take long, was painless and I enjoyed looking at the images.

The fun then is to pick the ones you want to scan at high quality on your own machine which is what I’m doing now. Hopefully, there is someone in Denmark who’ll be able to do this (I don’t mean a drugstore!!) or if you’re willing to go international, I can suggest where to get this done in the UK.

 

[PrebenJaeger]

I would go further than Bob - in my opinion, 10,000 images will drive you mad, will take a long time, and I think you might find yourself resenting the process instead of enjoying the gems that you find.

I recently had a similar dilemma, and I ended up giving my family archive (around 2,500 negatives and slides in rolls and strips) to a specialist shop to scan on their Frontier. It didn’t take long, was painless and I enjoyed looking at the images.

The fun then is to pick the ones you want to scan at high quality on your own machine which is what I’m doing now. Hopefully, there is someone in Denmark who’ll be able to do this (I don’t mean a drugstore!!) or if you’re willing to go international, I can suggest where to get this done in the UK.

We'll see if I go mad. I definitely get your point, but I ended up buying the 4000 yesterday. I just need to find a workflow that makes sense.