Photo Credit: Nikon Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 ED with adapter for single slides and Nikon Super Coolscan 9000 ED for 35mm and medium format

Supported Film Formats and Bulk Scanning
You should already know before you purchase a scanner whether you want to scan 35mm, APS, medium format, or large format film. Currently, there is no affordable scanner for processing all formats in good quality. All common desktop scanners can handle 35mm negatives and slides, but support for additional formats varies.

For example, Nikon’s Super Coolscan 9000 ED scans 35mm and medium format from 4.5 × 6cm to 6 × 9cm. There are even adapters for such exotic formats as 16mm film, 24 × 65mm panoramas, medical slides, and electron microscope film, but they are all rather expensive.
Another important feature is the scanner’s capacity for bulk scanning. For that, you load the scanner with material, configure the scan, and let it run unattended. It is almost impossible to digitize an extensive image archive without powerful bulk processing. It is simply unrealistic to digitize several thousand slides one by one. The slide feeder SF-210 lets you run stacks of up to seventy-five slides (with thin mounts) through your Coolscan LS-5000 without supervision. This vastly reduces your workload - as long as no slides jam.

Coolscan 5000 ED with slide feeder for a maximum of seventy-five slides, depending on the mount thickness.
Image: © Nikon

A film scanner should support bulk scan at least for negative strips. A motorized filmstrip adapter is now a standard piece of equipment. Here the mechanical quality of the scanner is important, so that the film is advanced precisely to the next frame after every scan.



A configuration of the 5000 ED that incorporates a roll film adapter.

Images: © Nikon

Bulk scanning requires high mechanical quality hardware. If the film transport or the slide feeder frequently jams and requires manual interaction, the feature becomes useless. Scanners such as the Reflecta DigitDia 4000 can scan entire slide trays even in their basic configuration. Nikon has a different approach. Mounted slides, filmstrips, film rolls, slide stacks, and APS film can be scanned, but the scanner only comes with the slide mount and filmstrip adapters; any other adapter must be purchased separately. A film roll adapter alone costs far more than a basic film scanner. At that price, you get a slightly modified filmstrip adapter and a large film spool for winding up the film nicely.

Using a sophisticated adapter is unnecessary and is not economical, if you scan film rolls only occasionally. The Reflecta ProScan 4000 provides a simpler solution: A second opening in the scanner lets you feed long filmstrips. Nikon offers no solution for scanning slides directly from the slide tray. You have to manually insert stacks of slides into the slide feeder. If you do not want to do that, you can get the DigitDia 4000 mentioned earlier, which is structurally identical with the Braun Multimag SlideScan 4000.



Left: the Reflecta DigitDia 4000 can scan slides from their trays.
Right: the Reflecta ProScan 4000 can also scan uncut film rolls.

Scanner Light Sources
The scanner’s light source greatly affects the scanning process. Traditional lamp technologies for scanners, such as halogen or fluorescent lamps, require a certain warm-up time before they can deliver a stable light. Meanwhile, newer technologies are taking over: for example, modern LED light sources provide stable lighting and therefore do not need any warm-up time. They also don’t heat up, which is an advantage when scanning delicate originals.

For their current generation of scanners, Nikon and Konica-Minolta use LED lights. There are separate LEDs for each individual color channel. The disadvantage of LEDs is that they produce harsh lighting.

With damaged originals, such as scratched black and white negatives, every scratch shows up prominently. This will make post-processing more time-consuming. A simple sheet of diffusing film placed in front of the scanner’s light source can greatly reduce this unwanted effect.
Alternatively, you can insert a special translucent plastic plate, such as the Scanhancer. 

Diffusers soften the light, which makes the scratches appear less prominent. This reduces touch-up effort considerably.

Scanners with soft lighting produce better images from black and white material. The comparison pictures show a black and white negative scanned first with a Nikon Coolscan 5000 ED and then with an ArtixScan 120tf. The Microtek is a somewhat older design and has no LED light source. The manual does not specify what kind of lamp is used, but it seems to be a cold cathode fluorescent lamp. Similar lighting is used in light tables.

While the Nikon image clearly needs touching up for the obvious scratches, with the Minolta scanner the scratches are hardly noticeable. This shows how a scanner’s design determines for which type of film it performs best.















The harsh LED lighting of the Nikon Coolscan IV emphasizes scratches and makes them very visible. With color originals, you can compensate for this by using ICE, but black and white originals have to be touched up manually.


Harsh lighting adversely affects not only how scratches are handled but also how the film grain shows in the image. Soft lighting generates a much more pleasing image of the grain. Of course, having a scanner that does not emphasize the grain is better than performing grain reduction afterwards in software. As demonstrated, you should be aware that, for technical reasons, one single scanner model couldn’t produce equally good results for all types of film.

It’s All in the Lens
A scanner lens projects the width of the film onto a CCD line sensor. This lens has to meet optical requirements typical of a top quality 35mm macro lens. State-of-the-art scanners have sophisticated lenses such as seven-element designs with exotic low-dispersion glass. Multi-format film scanners are even more demanding: the Coolscan 9000 ED has a lens with an astonishing fourteen elements. Poor lenses are the main reason that scanners perform below their advertised resolution.

Ultimately you can always tell from the scans how much went into the design and manufacture of the film scanner. Please look at the test images on the included DVD. You will find big differences between scanners that have the same nominal specifications.

A good film scanner can read enough information off of 35mm film to enable high-quality 11” × 17” enlargements. Just as in the case of conventional photography, the lens is crucial for image quality. Only high-quality optics can generate a good image. You should consider this when comparing scanners. If the scanner’s lens is of poor quality, good values for color depth and scanning speed are useless. Ultimately, only the final image results count. Please look at the sample scans on the included DVD. There you can see clearly which manufacturers have configured their scanners properly.

A computer expert by training and a photographer by passion, Sascha Steinhoff used several rainy seasons in Ireland to learn everything he needed to know about scanners and scanning software. He soon realized that a good scan requires as much work and know-how as a good camera shot, and that a scanning workflow is essential to get the job done.

Scanning Negatives and Slides is published by Rocky Nook and distributed in the United States by O'Reilly.