[Leica] OT: HELP Nikon scanner neophyte

[tgray at 125px.com (Tim Gray)]

On Apr 28, 2010 at 09:14 PM -0500, James Laird wrote:
> I saw the updates for Nikonscan on their webite and downloaded them.
> What's the difference between Vuescan and Nikonscan? (Mind you I don't
> even have the scanner yet, I'm just trying to get ahead of the
> learning curve;)

Nikonscan lets you use digital ICE for one, which is nice for color neg and 
slides.  It removes dust and scratches for you.  It doesn't work on silver 
B&W however.  Nikonscan also does some interpretation of the color for you. 
I've been happy with Nikonscan's color for the most part, so I just scan in 
there for color and tweak in Photoshop.

I've tried doing B&W with it, but it seems harder for me to get a flat scan. 
Vuescan also lets you select the channel you use to make B&W, which can make 
a difference in sharpness.

Since I do my own B&W, if I want small scans for flickr and such, I have to 
do them myself.  Vuescan is pretty quick if you set it to 1333 dpi; much 
quicker than Nikonscan in my experience.  That's enough for a 4x6 print at 
300dpi.  I don't dev my own color.  I always get scans done at the time of 
dev, so I only scan the files I want at 4000dpi and I don't need this faster 
small scan functionality for color.

It's easy to get a flat scan of B&W negs in Vuescan.

So the long and short of it is that I find Vuescan faster for low res scans 
and easy to get flat B&W scans, while Nikonscan gives good color for me and 
lets me use ICE, so I use that for color.

I don't know how well Vuescan works with the 9000 or the batch feeders on 
the 5000.  You might get more functionality out of those scanners with 
Nikonscan.