Keep Nikon 9000 or sell it in favor of Eversmart/Fuji C-550/Agfa XY-15

[Vord]

Thanks MisterPrinter! Probably having a look at it next week so I'll let you know.

[Peter De Smidt]

How come Peter? Like I said I'm quite happy with the results of the Nikon, but swapping out frame after frame doesn't make for very good productivity, at the time I'm just making contact sheets with an old Epson 4870 I have select off of that and then scan them properly on the Nikon.

Professional flatbeds are huge, and they often depend on very expensive parts. To buy bulbs, for example, for my Cezanne would be $400, assuming they are still available. Second, ICE with color materials is a huge time saver, and the pro flatbeds don't have it. It's true that with a pro flatbed you can load up the bed and set up a bunch of scans, assuming your computer has the hard drive space.

[Ivan J. Eberle]

Any moment now the Plustek Opticfilm 120 is set to launch. If it's all that the specs suggest, it may leave the Coolscan 9000 in the dust, particularly wrt 645 format. So your Coolscan may never be more valuable than it presently is, going forward.

[Vord]

Professional flatbeds are huge, and they often depend on very expensive parts. To buy bulbs, for example, for my Cezanne would be $400, assuming they are still available. Second, ICE with color materials is a huge time saver, and the pro flatbeds don't have it. It's true that with a pro flatbed you can load up the bed and set up a bunch of scans, assuming your computer has the hard drive space.

Spotting has never been much of an issue for me, it wasn't on my other scanner at least and I reckon it'll be even less so on a scanner such as this, at least not more so.

Any moment now the Plustek Opticfilm 120 is set to launch. If it's all that the specs suggest, it may leave the Coolscan 9000 in the dust, particularly wrt 645 format. So your Coolscan may never be more valuable than it presently is, going forward.

I however highly doubt this will be the case given Plusteks track record of scanners... i.e. their 35mm scanners.

[Deliberate1]

I used a Nikon 9000 for about 5 years, mostly scanning 6x6 from Rollei 6008 shot chromes. It was a great rig. The program was easy to use and the ICE feature was a time saver.
And then I bought a Toyo 45A. The Nikon could not handle chromes that big. So I found an Eversmart Pro II on Ebay and have been using that for the past few years for both MF and LF. Whether dry or wet mount, the Eversmart produces superior scans. With a well exposed, "easy" image, you may see little difference between the two. But when it comes to harder images, particularly with dark shadows, there is no comparison. You can pull much more detail out with the Eversmart. It is more cumbersome and time consuming to use. It does not have the slick holders that the Nikon does (I had the glass one). And you have to use templates to get the best results. But I do individual scans (no batch), so the time issues are not important. And despite the lack of ICE, if you do a good job cleaning the film, there should be little to clean up on Photoshop.
Finally, you may know that Nikon stopped producing the 9000 in December 2009. That caused a spike in the used market. I bought mine about eight years ago for $1800 and sold it last year for just under twice that.
In short, I can highly recommend the Pro II. I actually bought an IQIII "cheap" on Ebay. It needed a bit of work and did not have the Oxygen software, which I have since acquired. While talking to a Scitex tech, he told me that the optics for the ProII were superior to those on the IQIII, so I never bothered to put it on line.
Hope this helps.
David

[Kodachrome25]

The only reason I would ever get rid of my 9000ED would be to get an X5, but at $25,000, I just don't know if it would be worth it because all I would really be getting it for is 4x5 which I could outsource for far less money...

[Lenny Eiger]

The only reason to get rid of it would be to get a drum scanner. With all of those scanners, you are still working with a CCD... some have better lenses than others, but withy all you are going thru another lens. If you want better results, go to a PMT.

The idea of spending 25K is ridiculous, IMO. There are so many scanners out there for $1500-$7500 with all the trimmings, which would be far superior to the X5. We don't even know how long film will be around. I'm hoping forever, but we don't really know. Investing 25-50K doesn't make sense unless you can make that back in a year or two.

Lenny

[Kodachrome25]

You are right Lenny, but instead of trying to fit a drum scanner in my small ski resort sized apartment, I am better off using my D800 as a web / comp device for 4x5 and then getting professional scans of the selects. But I have been looking at drum scanners for at least 4 years now. The 9000ED is pretty fantastic for everything else though, I had West Coast Imaging do a scan of a New York City aerial shot at night on Kodachrome a few years back. Then I scanned the same image on my Nikon and with some work, it looked pretty darn good. Not as good as the drum in terms of shadow detail or the finest of details, but surprisingly good for a $2,000 CCD running Silverfast...

90% of what I print is black and white in a true darkroom anyway, the scans are just for promotion and book projects..

[Ivan J. Eberle]

The 4K dpi scan resolution of the Nikon CS9000 makes it a great scanner for 6x7* and up, but it may be leaving 1/2 the available resolution on the table for the best that the smaller formats can achieve. So hell yes, if big prints from 645 are in the mix, sell it for $3K and get something that can hit 8K instead. This "when I need a better scan I'll outsource it" argument is okay as far as it goes, . But typically it ignores all the redundant time spent in post/Photoshop, or that color-matching between old and new scans can be painful, For instance, if you have existing prints and someone requests an outsized one.
*exception being Mamiya 7.

[Kodachrome25]

Exactly Ivan, the 9000ED for my 35mm and 6x6 and true drum scans for my 4x5. I read your service offerings, I might use you for the latter...