I have almost 10.000 mounted slides taken over the last 25 years that I would like to scan. I'm thinking about buying the Nikon LS-5000 with the Slide Feeder SF-210 to batch process 50 slides at the time.
Have any of you used this scanner and the sw? Is it usable for batch processing? Doing som post prosessing in Ligthromm etc. is OK, but the sw must be able to do an ok job i the first place with regard to exposure etc. to capture the dynamic range in the image. I do not want to have to check each image and have to rescan with manual settings....
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I have tens of thousands of slides by myself, and I scanned lots of them using the predecessor model LS4000, with both Roll Film Adapter and the Slide Feeder SF200.
It is a viable solution to get the job done, however, it is not a perfect setting.
SF200 and the almost identical SF210 will not take any slide trays, so you will be forced to unload the slides from trays,
and to rotate every each of them if they are vertical ("portrait"). This is a tedious job. The slides will land in the exit tray of SF200/210 in an opposite order, thus you will have to load them in an opposite order to your trays. SF200 used to jam very often, we all used the "world famous credit card and paper clip trick," the SF210 promises to be better in this matter. The slides rub on each other during the feed, thus if you have these cardboard mounts, be prepared to battle a serious amount of nasty particles.
Of course, we can safely assume that nobody will be adding newer scanner models anylonger. Thus Nikon LS5000+SF210 might the best because the only game in town.
Actually
Braun and Pacific Image made a scanner with a lesser resolution, what is a combination of a Braun slide projector and scanner. This scanner takes trays, what would liberate you from removing and loading back the slides in trays and rotating them!
Lightroom, the recent monstrosity of Adobe, is
not your solution to processing scanned film raw files!!! They are called raw, they may have also a suffix *.NEF, but they are not "camera raw" files! They are rather RGB lossless files, which you cannot even process in Lightroom so far. It comes worse: NikonScan is a very naive program concerning Color Management or image processing ability. You mileage may vary, I made myself cozy in the following workflow:
1) scan using LS5000/LS4000 with
Nikon Color Management *off*, make large max. color depth TIFF files, 14 resp. 16 bit per color channel, preferably with ICE dust removal and maybe even GEM grain analyser set to your film, and
2) use Vuescan to process them including an ICC profile for each film kind.
I am not a very big fan of Vuescan, neither of the a bit awkward and rough way of dealing with the customer support, but simply I have not found anything better to this workflow. Vuescan will allow you to make a batch conversion of any number of files, albeit only with the same setting of color adjustment for the entire batch.
If you will try to work one by one on each image using NikonScan, you will spend untold hours of time on rescans initiated by NikonScan at some surprizing points of time. By making "raw files" to the disk, you will be able to avoid this tedious rescanning, and make your corrections as long you might need it at the speed dictated by your computer. The resulting image goes into Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or Picture Window etc.
Film profiles: Working with Vuescan will allow you to use IT8 targets or target strips to make your own film profiles, or more accurately, to make scanner profiles. Scan the target with identical settings which you would be using later with regular images, and use Vuescan to generate ICC profile from this scan. This way you will generate a combined film+scanner profile for your setting, not to be confused with any profiles made from greycards or WhiBal cards. Observe that you can do the same process with negatives(!!), what simplified the processing greatly. Scan the negative image of an IT8 target using NikonScan to obtain a positive image of the target, and use Vuescan again to generate the ICC profile.
As of now, Lightroom does not even read in correctly NEF's from NikonScan, neither does it allow you to make any ICC profile for your film! However, we do not know what will be the final shape of this tool.
About SF200/SF210: There is no real limit of 50 images in these adapters, this is merely a space constraint. You can remove scanned slides from the output tray one by one, and keep adding some to the input tray while the scanner works. This will practically implement an "endless batch." The only problem is that the log window in the miserable written NikonScn runs out of space(!!!) for the logs. But the scan will go on.
