Nikon Coolscan V LS-50 ED price and reviews

Slide feeder works, then jams. It will not do any slides that do not have plastic jackets.
It jams 10 times a day when doing slides with plastic jackets. I thought Nikon was a quality outfit. They must be desperate to put this design out there. The 35 mm slide feeder is tin and springs contraption that works only some of the time? The item is only good for scanning one slide at a time. Big dissapointment. Very poor product from Nikon, I expected a lot more?

Nikon makes little or no effort to give the consumer a satisfying experience. I purchased an Epson V700 in addition to this scanner because both my parents gave up on it. Vuescan and Silverfast offer great alternatives to the NikonScan interface, but their infrared cleaning options are still too much weaker than the official Digital ICE supplied with the NikonScan interface. If your negatives and slides are in GOOD condition, VueScan or Silverfast will fix your NikonScan woes, and in that case you've got a great 35mm (35mm ONLY) scanner. If you need the Digital ICE, you need to use the supremely awful NikonScan software interface. For that reason alone this scanner becomes just too frustrating to use. The rest of my review/tirade is about NikonScan.

I have spent a LOT of time working with this scanner. So understand these are cumulative complaints over an extended period. Short term occasional use might not show any of these issues, who knows. Maybe the software has a memory leak.. Anyway here's my feeling on it after one year. The NikonScan scanning software supplied with this product is clunky, counterintuitive, crash-prone, and rarely upgraded. It says right out of the box "Not Compatible with Photoshop." Attempts to import with Photoshop CS2 do in fact crash the interface and lock up Photoshop.

Given the amount of time necessary to fix a damaged slide, the defects of NikonScan become overwhelming. Changing almost any of the settings causes the scanner to re-scan the slide, and it really starts to wear on you after a while. This program does way too many "vanishing crashes" where it just blips out of existance with no warning, meaning all work is lost. I have been scanning dust damaged slides from Vietnam with this thing, and it does take up to 15 minutes per slide just getting the initial scan to work right before going to Photoshop to do color corrections. When the program "blips" away in the 14th minute you want to kill something. Unfortunately settings which should be "sticky" reset themselves randomly, and are lost when the program crashes in mid preview.

It's possible to get results from NikonScan, but you better prepare yourself for the troubles ahead.

Just for the record, I've installed and used the scanner on Windows 2000 Pro, XP Pro SP1 & SP2, and XP Home. The problems translate perfectly to each machine.

I replaced an older Minolta scanner with the coolscan V a few months ago. If you're scanning 35mm, the coolscans are among the best money can buy. I have a lot of Velvia, Provia-F, Kodak technical pan B&W film, Agfa APX-25 and a ton of other old and weird films to scan. I've been scanning these for the past few months. Scan results are far better than I ever expected after getting used to the low bar set by the Minolta. Not to dis the minolta but the Coolscan runs laps around it when it comes to the sheer amount of detail this baby is able to extract. As far as resolution, sharpness and detail are concerned there is simply no comparison.

One small gripe is about black and white film. Maybe it's the nature of the ED glass and the very high precision LED light system, but with the capture of very fine detail, this scanner seems to accentuate flaws in B&W film. Too precise and sharp maybe? However I am not complaining since the results are outstanding.

This is a very high quality scanner that is in a different league compared to those cheaper flatbeds with film scan attachments, and those cheaper Minolta and canon scanners. People often compare the Epson V750 and V700 with this, but look at a scan in full resolution and even though the Nikon has a lower real resolution, the amount of detail captured simply thrashes the Epsons.

My new Coolscan worked well for about six hours and then the film strip adapter it needs broke down. I sent it overnight to Nikon for a replacement under their one year guaranty. They have had it for three weeks and can give me no idea of when they will ship a replacement. It is now a large paperweight on my desk. Not my best purchase.

Nikon quality throughout, also Nikon software complexity.

I have used the Nikon Coolscan V for over a year now and scanned both slides and negative film with no problems. Most, if not all of what I scan is slides since that is what I shoot and 99% of that is Velvia. So I looked for a scanner that would handle the range that Velvia produces. I had never used a scanner so I read reviews and did my homework. Set-up and installation was easy and quick. Within an hour I was scanning my first slides. I generally scan useing only the Digital ICE feature to remove scratches then open the finished scan in Photoshop for any further adjustments. I have used the Tools within the NikonScan software to 'tweek' slides before output with excellent results.
I have thousands of slides but no intention of scanning them all. That would be WAY too time consuming. Instead, I have been going through and picking out my best to save for scanning. I have not encountered any of the problems others have written about.
Bottom line - An easy to set-up, consumer friendly scanner that produces excellent results.

Has an excellent range of picture modifying tools. It can handle aged slides and over exposed or under exposed usually quite well. Some Kodachrome slides, when using the powerful Digital ICE-4, can come out with a solid color that ruins the pictiure. How ever, these slides can usually be handled fairly well with other tools

I am very happy that I purchased my Nikon Coolscan. I am digitizing a gazillion slide my Dad had taken from the 1950's-1970's. Setting up the scanner was easy; install the software, plug in the scanner and you are good to go. The default scan file is a tiff, so I scanned a few images with huge file sizes before I figured out how to set it to jpg (easy), but no other complaints! I've scanned over 100 slides so far and a few b & w negs too!