Scanner Tune-Ups for the Fearless

In some ways scanner manufacturers are quite deaf to their customer's demands. But if you are not so conscious about keeping up warranty regulations there is quite much, what you can do to improve your scans. Some of these methods will void your warranty, so please check carefully if it is worth the risk. This section contains english tutorials only. There are some very interesting german tutorials as well, please switch the language of this website to check them out. Thanks to Jens from www.sacalobra.com for providing me many of the links mentioned below.

Converting Nikon SA-21 Strip Feeder to SA-30 Roll Feeder

Nikon ships its Collscan 4000 and Coolscan 5000 with SA-21 strip feeder. That'S quite handy, but you cannot scan film strips with more than 6 pictures with. For complete film rolls up to 40 images Nikon wants you to buy the roll feeder SA-30 for a hefty 600 US-Dollars. Well, there is cheaper ways around if you have some technical skills.

German engineer Helmut Stöpfgeshoff shows on his self-titled website www.helmut-stoepfgeshoff.de in a nice and very detailed tutorial, how you can convert a SA-21 into a SA-30. Here the direct link to the tutorial. If you are located within Europe he can help you with that for a small charge.

The original SA-30 and the modified SA-21 work only with Coolscan 4000 and Coolscan 5000. They are both not compatible with Coolscan IV and Coolscan V.

There is another tutorial by a guy named Jesse hidden in the depths of www.jumboprawn.net. It is less detailed but nonetheless very interesting, you can find it here.

Clean a Nikon Scanner yourself

Scanner get dirty after a while and that does actually do no good to the quality of the scans. They have to be cleaned from the inside, but this is a quite pricy pleasure if you ask a Nikon repair shop for support. The cheaper alternative is to do it yourself. Just check out these tutorials and see if your mechanical skills are suffcient for this delicate job.

If you are not sure if your scanner needs cleaning, check out these pages:

Full Maintenance Service on Nikon CoolScan Slide Scanner

There is a PDF around that describes a full maintenance process for Coolscan Scanners. Although you can discuss if you really should put lucrication into a scanner - some experts say you better should not - it provides an interesting view from within a Nikon. Click here to download the PDF.

Wet mounting your scans

In the world of drum scanning it it quite common to apply scanning liquids to enhance your scanning quality. For nowadays flatbed and even some film scanners you can make use of this technology, too. It works i.e. with Epson V700/V750 and Nikon Coolscan 8000/9000.

  • www.wetmounting.com alias www.scanscience.com is a manufacturer that sells wet mounting kits for a wide range of scanners and scanning liquids as well
  • Epson ships the Perfection V750-M Pro Scanner with a fluid mounting kit. Click here to see the product.
  • Kodak offers an Oil Mounting Station for their EVERSMART and IQSMART scanners. Click here to see the product.

Unoffical Vista/Windows 7 driver for Nikon Scan 4.03

Nikon seems to have abandoned the development for its Nikon Scan software. Due to this i.e. the software does not run on 64bit-Vista. Click here to find an unsupported Vista x64 driver for LS-8000/9000. If you scroll down the post a little bit, you will find a lot of hints how hint how to make Nikon Scan work with other Nikon scanners as well. There is a useful hints how to get Nikon Scan running with Windows 7, too.

Light diffusor

Some problems you might have when scanning with Nikon Scanners are due to the harsh LED-light they use. There are products like www.scanhancer.com, that try to solve this issue.

If you are an innovator yourself, you can try www.optigrafix.com which offer some light diffusor films. These might help you buildung an own product. Click here to view the PDF-datasheet.

Custom Film Holders for Flatbed Scanners

Manufacturer www.betterscanning.com has a wide variety of custom film holders for flatbed scanners like Epson 4990, V700, V750 or Canon 8400F, 8800F just to mention a few. With variable height they should provide better scanning results as the standard film holders. Click here to see a comparison of standard vs. betterscanning film holders.

 

 
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