| Nikon LS2000 Film Scanner
Steve Hoffmann's Nature and Landscape Photography
Table of Contents: SilverFast and VueScan Aftermarket Scanner Control Software The LS2000 when used with WINDOWS XP needs support software called ASPI. You can download it HERE. Install this before installing Nikon Scan Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Nikon. This review is based entirely on my own experiences with my LS2000. Comments on Hardware, Software and InstallationThe image of the LS2000 at the top of this page shows it configured with the supplied 35mm negative strip adapter. The LS2000 also comes with a 35mm slide scan attachment. Both of these adapters slide into the main scanner unit and can be exchanged while the unit is on and the software active. The automatic slide feeder and the APS film adapter are optional. The LS2000 will only scan 35mm and APS films. This scanner comes with it's own Adaptec SCSI adapter and cable. The power supply for the scanner is internal. You can scan film strips of 2 to 6 frames. You are warned to not use film strips that are curved side to side beyond a few millimeters. There is gauge at the top of the film strip feeder. Nikon supplies a film strip holder that can be used with damaged film strips in the slide adapter. I've yet to run into a film strip that didn't feed correctly. Slides are hand pushed right into the slide adapter and there is a mechanical button to eject them. This scanner uses 3 color LEDs for image illumination. This is a departure from most scanner hardware configurations. This partially collimated lighting is supposed to produce very accurate color renditions but also seems to magnify the scratches and dust on your slides or negatives in the final scan when compared to scans from lamp illuminated scanners. The scanner's mechanical operation has been flawless so far. The LS2000 comes with very adequate documentation. There is a quick start sheet for advanced users and small manual with a bit more detail to help beginners get started. The operations manuals are on CDROM in Adobe Acrobat format. If you don't have Acrobat installed on your computer, there is a copy on this CD. This CD-ROM manual is good for most areas of scanner operation. However, I found it to be not detailed enough for my needs occasionally. Some features and tasks were just not explained fully. There is absolutely no online help of any sort in Nikon Scan. You have to insert the CD-ROM any time you need help. The software graphical interface is Windows oriented with sliders and buttons. You can do all your cropping, color adjustments, contrast and brightness adjustments while looking at the preview image. There is a nice histogram for doing levels and curves. I am used to the PhotoSmart GUI (graphical user interface) and the Nikon GUI works fine for me. Some folks have complained that it's not sophisticated enough. Frankly, at my level of experience, I don't see that it's lacking in any way. This software supports ICC color profiles. The GUI and software are easy to learn to use. The software at level 2.1 was a bit buggy on my Pentium 333 with 128 megs of RAM running Windows 98 with an Adaptec 2940au SCSI adapter. Nikon Scan wouldn't open from my desktop with the negative feeder inserted unless there is a negative strip already loaded into the scanner. If I forget to load a strip, I got the dreaded illegal operation error crash. Strangely enough, if I just had Photoshop running in the background, I could open Nikon Scan from the desktop without pre-loading a negative strip. Or, I if I made a generic text only printer and made it the default printer then Nikon Scan didn't need the negative strip pre-loaded (Nikon tech support's solution to this problem). Nikon tech support now recognized this problem as an incompatibility issue with my Adaptec 2940au SCSI card. This problem may occur with all Adaptec 2940xx cards. This problem and a few others are addressed with the latest firmware upgrade to 1.31 and Nikon Scan software at level 2.5. You can download the newest firmware and software from http://www.nikontechusa.com/. You must be at 1.31 firmware level to use Nikon Scan 2.5. If you are running Windows XP or 2000, you will need to install Adpatec's ASPI layer in order for the scanner to be recognized by your PC. In a Photo Paint 8 Twain acquire you can't rotate the image in preview. If you do this, you will get a bogus out of memory error and the Twain acquire terminates. You have to leave the preview image in it's native vertical position when using Nikon Scan as a Twain acquire in Photo Paint 8. The PhotoSmart scanner Twain acquire has no problems with a rotated image in Photo Paint 8. You do need to read and pay attention to the readme that comes with the Windows version of this scanner. The scanner needs the latest ASPI32 layer to operate correctly with Adaptec SCSI cards. I had to download this and another file from the Adaptec site before the scanner was recognized by my Adaptec 2940au SCSI card. Overall, I am extremely pleased with the quality of the scans this unit produces. I believe it comes close to producing drum scan quality digital images. At nearly $1900 USA it's fairly expensive but for folks who want to scan images for professional publication, I think it's worth the money. NEWS 6/01: - After 3 years of mild use (300-500 scans) my LS2000 developed lens carriage stepper motor problems and will now only scan at 16X sampling at full resolution. Any other resolution or scan mode produces blurred jagged scans. It is a known fact that stepper motor failure is a fairly common occurrence for the LS2000. People buying this scanner used should 'try before you buy' if at all possible. Nikon Color Management with Nikon Scan 2.5Nikon has addressed a major shortcoming of their earlier software versions with Nikon Scan 2.5. You now have several calibrated RGB color spaces to work with suitable for Mac or PC. Now available for PC with a gamma of 2.2 is sRGB, Adobe 1998 RGB, Bruce RGB, CIE RGB, wide gamut RGB, wide gamut compensated RGB and NTC. You can still deselect Nikon Color Management and scan to un-calibrated RGB. For Apple/Mac with a gamma of 1.8 you now have color match RGB and Apple RGB compensated, The ability to adjust images in the HSL color space has been removed from Nikon Scan 2.5. Previously, in software version 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 all you had was sRGB and un-calibrated RGB. sRGB is still a rather new standard and some folks are not comfortable with it. The following information is a quote and was taken from Adobe Photoshop's Color Management technical support page. The link to this information is no longer available. However, I'll print the information and hope that Adobe won't get after me..;^) "sRGB is a standard promoted primarily by Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft. It reflects the standards for HDTV broadcast (Gamma=2.2, Primaries=HDTV, White Point=6500K). One of the reasons to use sRGB is that Hewlett-Packard is promoting a workflow in which hardware devices such as scanners, non-PostScript printers, and Web browsers will be optimized for RGB data in the sRGB space. If you are using such devices, sRGB will provide the simplest workflow. sRGB reflects the characteristics of the average PC monitor. If you are producing graphics to be viewed on the Web, sRGB will reflect what most viewers see. The downside to sRGB is that it has a limited color gamut and cannot represent as many colors as other color spaces. It is not a good choice for professional prepress users since too much of the CMYK gamut lies outside of it." Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard think sRGB solves a lot of problems with un-calibrated RGB. Personally, I find sRGB perfect for web imaging and printing on my PhotoSmart printer. I am now using Adobe 1998 RGB for scans that are intended to be used for printing by offset press. If you deselect Nikon Color Management, you cannot use ICC color profiles. If you use Nikon Scan as a twain acquire, all data is converted to RGB before it arrives in your imaging program. The CMYK color space is preserved only when Nikon Scan is used as a stand alone application. You can import and use ICC profiles when scanning to the CMYK color space. Nikon provides ICC profiles for it's Bruce RGB and the other color spaces that Nikon Scan uses. You can import these ICC files into Photoshop and use them as your color space profile. These ICC profile files are installed by default in PC computers in Program files/common/nikon/profiles. Bruce RGB is supposed to have almost all the colors used by the SWOP ink/ CMYK gamut used in offset press printing. The earliest versions of Nikon Color Management did not work correctly 100% of the time for me. In my opinion Nikon Scan's earliest version of sRGB was not very good. Nikon's new version of Adobe 1998 RGB looks pretty good and I think they've improved the math for sRGB too. I've included a newly scanned 3 image composite of what was a difficult scan with the older version of Nikon's sRGB. The sRGB version of the leaf in the lower left hand corner of this image looks quite a bit better (less posterish) than the sRGB scan from the older sRGB version. My LS2000 seemed to produce a slight bluish or cyan cast in all scans up to 2.2 software level. I think they have made some improvement in this area too at 2.5 level software. sRGB scans of my wife's face from Fuji's new Provia F slide film seemed to produce very good skin tones with a very slight reddish cast with the software's default sRGB color selections. The Adobe RGB color space scans still seemed to have a slight bluish or cyan cast. These color casts are small and easy to fix in the scanner's color adjustment software. A Kodak Gold 100 negative portrait that I recently had a bit of trouble with when scanning with Nikon Scan 2.2 had good color choices with the default color selection when scanned with Nikon Scan 2.5 in the sRGB color space. That same scan done a couple of days ago with Nikon Scan 2.2 was a bit greenish or cyan and by the time I got the green/cyan out of the model's blond hair there was slight magenta/red cast to her skin. Nikon Scan at level 2.5 seems to be much improved over the earlier software versions. I has come to my attention that there may still be some problems with Nikon Scan 2.5 color management. I am mostly scanning large and medium format images these days and I have only spent a couple of hours with Nikon Scan 2.5 so far. Nikon Scan is now up to level 4.0. Visit the Nikon Scan web site and read the FAQ before downloading and installing Nikon Scan 4. Nikon Scan's Graphical InterfaceThis software provides all of the pre-scan image manipulation controls. There are two integrated parts to the software. If you use the twain acquire feature in Win 95/98 your twain compliant imaging program will bring up Nikon Scan's GUI window that has access to all of the pre-scan control features. If you use Nikon Scan as a stand alone you get an extra window tiled with the control panel window that has very basic save, save as, copy and zoom functions. This window also has a button to re-open the actual image control panel and a selection tool. However, I've found no options to crop or do anything with your selected marquee area. You can rotate or flip the image from this window too. Used from your desktop, Nikon Scan always opens both windows tiled on each other.
The window shown above is the basic Nikon Scan desktop application save, print or view window. In this screen capture we have completed the scan and are ready to zoom in and inspect it to be sure we want to save it. In Nikon Scan 2.1 or later, you can also select to scan and save to a directory of your choice if you don't think you need to examine the image before you save it.
The screen capture shown above is the actual pre-scan image control panel. This window opens from the desktop application of Nikon Scan along with the window shown above this. In twain acquires this (above) is the only window you will see in your imaging program. This view shows thumbnail images from a negative scan. The thumbnail tray is a pop out device. After loading your negative strip and opening the program you click the thumbnail tray pop-out and the program automatically generates thumbnail images. In this view the image with the greenish brackets on the corners has been selected to create a full preview image. The 8 buttons across the top are as follows; eject media, spot focus, zoom out, zoom in, and the rotate and flip controls. The settings button drop down lets you save your current settings, load a previously saved setting or revert to default settings. The drop down button that says positive is the film type setting, positive (slides) or negatives. There are three smaller round buttons toward the middle of the GUI. The 'pref' button allows you to access Nikon Scan's operational settings. We'll cover the preferences tab a bit later. The 'cont' button is an auto-contrast setting. All it does is save you the trouble of opening the second pop-out and doing auto levels. The 'pre-scan' button allows you to do a prescan to automatically adjust color and exposure before the scan or preview if you have these options de-selected in the preferences/misc tab. The three circular buttons toward the bottom of the GUI are as follows; cancel the current operation, start a preview of the selected negative frame or slide and the start scan button. The top section of the graphic in the middle gives you the height and width of your current crop and the bottom section displays the color value for the area the cursor is covering. Going down the left side you can see four vertical pop-out buttons. We'll cover pop-out buttons now.
There are four pop-out menus that come out from the side. The screen capture above shows second pop-out menu which is the histogram control. From this menu you can do an auto levels or you can adjust levels manually. You can choose to do all color channels at once or individual color channels. You can import curves from Photoshop. You can also manually set the white and black points with the eyedropper tools. The photo of the lake in this view is the full size preview image that you have to work with. This program window opens at about 600X450 pixels in size. See a screen capture of the new Nikon Scan 2.5 pre-scan control window with it's new expanded informational status display window.
scan size pop-out
The first pop out menu sets the scan size. It has an input and output section. I found this box to be somewhat confusing at first. You can accomplish scan size in two different ways. The way I use it now is to select the resolution I need in the res box in the output section and leave the input % of scale at 100. You can also scale your scan by selecting a percent of scale in the input box. You can select pixels, inches, picas, points, millimeters and centimeters for your unit of measurement. In the slide scan mode the resolution setting is saved. For some reason in the negative scan mode this setting always reverts to 1350 dpi.
brightness, contrast and color pop-out
This third pop-out panel is pretty self explanatory, sliders for brightness, contrast and one for each color channel. This screen capture is of the 2.5 software level pop-out and now also includes an optional window for precise numerical input for each adjustment slider.
scanner extras pop-out menu
Scanner ExtrasDigital ICE automatic defect correctionThere are eight options available in the fourth and last pop-out menu. The drop down that now says 'Cleanimage' is for the Digital ICE automatic image defect correction option. Clicking this button drops the menu down to show the seven other options. The bottom drop down that now says 'Mode: Off' is used to turn on and off or select parameters for the option currently selected in the top drop down. Digital ICE removes scratches, dust spots, and other image defects. It also smoothes the grain effect in midtone areas. See the Image defect correction page for examples and a critique of this feature. This feature adds a considerable amount of time to your scanning operation. A 2700 dpi scan normally takes about 35 seconds on my PII333 with 128megs of RAM. ICE increases this time to 1 minute 45 seconds. Manual focus adjustmentThere is a manual focus control that uses a slider type adjustment. Each time you move the slider you can re-preview the image and check the focus shift in the preview. I was never able to gain any increase in focusing accuracy using this method of focus. My best results with focus come with using selectable spot auto-focus or just doing the default autofocus in center of the image. The lens seems to have adequate depth of field. All of my scans seem sharp center to edge. Analog gain controlAnother available option lets you adjust the analog gain for each color channel or the master channel. This feature actually adjusts the brightness of each color LED ( red, green and blue) independently or all at once on the master channel. I've only checked this out briefly. It appears to act just as you would suspect and increase the image brightness and maybe depth into shadows at the expense of highlight detail. It may be quite appropriate to experiment with this feature with under exposed slides or dense negatives. Also, images with a color cast may be improved by experimenting with these controls. As an example, moving the blue LED slider up will increase the overall level of blue in your image in a slide scan. The software documentation recommends that you not use this tool with negative scans. Multi-sample scanningYou can select to use multi-sample scanning at 4X or 16X. 1X is the normal or default setting. This feature when set to 16X does a nice job of getting all the available shadow detail in slide scans with almost no visible noise artifacts. I didn't see enough difference at the 4X level to justify using 4X sampling. See the 16X scan examples page to see a critique and some comparisons between 1X and 16X sampling. This feature at 16X adds a considerable amount of time to your scanning operation. Also, for some reason when this option is selected it even operates in the preview mode. This makes previews tediously long. You have to remember to turn this option off before previewing and back on before the scan. This feature adds a considerable amount of time to your scanning operation. A 2700 dpi scan normally takes about 35 seconds on my PII333 with 128megs of RAM. At 16X sampling this time increases to 5 minutes and 15 seconds. Combining Multi-sampling at 16X with Digital ICE brings the total scan time up to 7 minutes and 45 seconds. Scanner Extras drop down
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