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Technical Details
- Automatic slide mount adapter
- For use with Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 series scanners
- Accepts slide-mounted 35mm film
- Up to 50 slides for batch scanning
Product details
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Product Description
Manufacturer's Description
Nikon is a precision optical company with worldwide manufacturing, research and marketing capabilities. The Nikon name is equated with extraordinary photographic performance, innovation, precision and optical quality.
Product Description
Nikon SF-210 Auto Slide Feeder for LS5000
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
34 of 34 people found the following review helpful
A real boon if you have a lot of slides to scan, this attachment for the LS-5000 scanner works pretty well and saves hours. Setting up is simple - you just slot it into the front of the scanner, which has to be lying in the horizontal position. It takes 50 slides and there is a slightly fiddly adjustment for thickness of mount - so it's best not to mix thin and thick in the same batch.
It worked faultlessly with plastic mounts but old card mounts quite often got stuck - this is a pain because resetting the scanner scrambles the Nikonscan software so you have to quit and restart. I finally figured out the problem - the inner edge of the mount of the slide being loaded catches on the opposite inner edge of the next slide: this is caused by slight splaying of the mounts. A solution which worked most of the time is to put a smooth rectangular object, about 1 x 1 x 4 cm (I used a handy artist's graphite block) upright between the sprung slide pusher and the last slide, on the side away from the scanner. This asymmetric pressure flares the stack of slides on the far side so they don't catch.
The scan software otherwise works fairly well and saves the images in a numbered series. You have to make any decisions in the scan options before you start a batch as you cannot change them between slides - if necessary you have to cancel the series, often quit & restart the software and start again, remembering to choose the right number to continue saving the images.
In summary, a few glitches but well worth the hassle as it's such a brilliant scanner.
Jonathan Charles (http://www.jonathancharlesphoto.com)
It worked faultlessly with plastic mounts but old card mounts quite often got stuck - this is a pain because resetting the scanner scrambles the Nikonscan software so you have to quit and restart. I finally figured out the problem - the inner edge of the mount of the slide being loaded catches on the opposite inner edge of the next slide: this is caused by slight splaying of the mounts. A solution which worked most of the time is to put a smooth rectangular object, about 1 x 1 x 4 cm (I used a handy artist's graphite block) upright between the sprung slide pusher and the last slide, on the side away from the scanner. This asymmetric pressure flares the stack of slides on the far side so they don't catch.
The scan software otherwise works fairly well and saves the images in a numbered series. You have to make any decisions in the scan options before you start a batch as you cannot change them between slides - if necessary you have to cancel the series, often quit & restart the software and start again, remembering to choose the right number to continue saving the images.
In summary, a few glitches but well worth the hassle as it's such a brilliant scanner.
Jonathan Charles (http://www.jonathancharlesphoto.com)
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Instalation easy. Instructions good. Could have had a marking on the product as to which way the glossy side of the slide was to be presented. Occasional misfeed, but ony when scanning mixed thickness slides. On single style slide no problems, assuming you set it up OK. I can load the casette and get on with other things. None of this failing once you leave it alone. Tackling the job magnificently.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
35 reviews
123 of 124 people found the following review helpful
Works, mostly
2 Feb 2005
Having read the horror stories about the previous slide feeder (SF-200), it was with some trepidation that I purchased this for the LS5000ED. I have thousands of slides to scan, and feeding them one at a time doesn't seem like an option.
I was pleased to find that the first batch of Kodak cardboard mounts went through without a hitch. These were some Kodachromes from the early 70s, normally exposed. The scanner took the stack of 40 without a problem and completed the scans. However, my good luck didn't really continue. About every third stack manages to jam, normally just after I watch the first 3 slides go through without a hitch and I leave for my real job.
This slide feeder is just plain poorly designed. The feed path is designed such that each slide must pass under the stack, giving the possibility of catching the edges of the window in the mount above. Additionally, for some reason, the slide gate adjustment, which adjusts for the thickness of the mount, wants to move a bit on it's own. Failure to re-adjust after stack has caused a couple of jams, where the gate moved off of vertical and closed the opening too far. These problems all occurred with rather uniform stacks of slide in good to excellent condition.
I've had no problems with Gepe plastic mounts for slides I've mounted myself, but that is normally only a small fraction of slides that people need to scan.
One solution to the jamming seems to be to use a shim to put the feed follower pressure on the outside of the slide stack. This fans the stack a bit on the inside, which has allowed a balky stack to feed okay. Be careful how you engineer this, however, as if the shim gets caught in the feed mechanism you'll have another set of problems getting the feeder back to normal.
An additional failure I have had once was for the autofocus to go totally wrong. It managed to scan an entire stack of slides badly mis-focused. I put the single slide adapter in and the slides focused and scanned fine. I put the feeder back, only to find the problem persisted. I was about to pack it off to Nikon, when I power cycled the whole thing and found that correct operation had been restored.
The error handling on the batch scanning is broken, with the software thinking that scans have been completed which haven't. This is just a nuisance, resulting in the wrong file number part of the saved files if you don't catch it when you restart the scan. However, my software does detect that the slide didn't feed, and just shuts down, requiring exiting and restarting the scanner software to resume.
And then there is the general issue of software stability. On Windows 2000 with the SP4+ stuff, I cannot use USB 2.0 (scanner software looses communications with the scanner, and restarting the software leads to a blue screen of death). I also have to restart the software after each roll of film (approximately) or the application crashes. I'm going to try XP one of these days and see if it's any better. Hard to say if it's Nikon or MS that is screwing this up. Probably a joint effort.
Update: now running on a fast machine with XP Pro SP2, USB2.0 - after solving the XP ROC-GEM problem, I can report that the software is reasonably stable, typically going several rolls or sets of slides without crashing. There are no system crashes under XP, just application faults. Slide scans take around a minute to 90 seconds each in the stack feeded.
One drawback of the slide feeder over the film strip batch scanner is that there is no way to do different scan settings for the slides in the stack. With film strips you can tweak the settings for each frame, but there is no preview capability in the batch scan from the slide feeder. This is an oversight that they could correct in the software. However, the feeder reverses the slide order, so you would have to restack the slides between the preview pass and the full scan pass, or the software would have to be smarter than Nikon.
So I just use a default of ICE on and DEE of 30 and rescan manually any very difficult shots. With the 16-bit channel depth (actually only 14 unless you do multisampling - correction, the 5000 does 16-bit scanning with or without multisampling, the V is 14-bit) most exposure and shadow/highlight problems can be compensated in Photoshop afterwards.
All in all, I give Nikon a C for this effort - they could do some software improvements to raise the grade to a B- with a preview option, and possibly get a real solid B if they modified the pressure plate (needs to be adjustable where the pressure is placed). But the horizontal stack design will always have jamming problems. Why they couldn't use a tray feed with an open acceptance path like working slide projectors is beyond me.
I was pleased to find that the first batch of Kodak cardboard mounts went through without a hitch. These were some Kodachromes from the early 70s, normally exposed. The scanner took the stack of 40 without a problem and completed the scans. However, my good luck didn't really continue. About every third stack manages to jam, normally just after I watch the first 3 slides go through without a hitch and I leave for my real job.
This slide feeder is just plain poorly designed. The feed path is designed such that each slide must pass under the stack, giving the possibility of catching the edges of the window in the mount above. Additionally, for some reason, the slide gate adjustment, which adjusts for the thickness of the mount, wants to move a bit on it's own. Failure to re-adjust after stack has caused a couple of jams, where the gate moved off of vertical and closed the opening too far. These problems all occurred with rather uniform stacks of slide in good to excellent condition.
I've had no problems with Gepe plastic mounts for slides I've mounted myself, but that is normally only a small fraction of slides that people need to scan.
One solution to the jamming seems to be to use a shim to put the feed follower pressure on the outside of the slide stack. This fans the stack a bit on the inside, which has allowed a balky stack to feed okay. Be careful how you engineer this, however, as if the shim gets caught in the feed mechanism you'll have another set of problems getting the feeder back to normal.
An additional failure I have had once was for the autofocus to go totally wrong. It managed to scan an entire stack of slides badly mis-focused. I put the single slide adapter in and the slides focused and scanned fine. I put the feeder back, only to find the problem persisted. I was about to pack it off to Nikon, when I power cycled the whole thing and found that correct operation had been restored.
The error handling on the batch scanning is broken, with the software thinking that scans have been completed which haven't. This is just a nuisance, resulting in the wrong file number part of the saved files if you don't catch it when you restart the scan. However, my software does detect that the slide didn't feed, and just shuts down, requiring exiting and restarting the scanner software to resume.
And then there is the general issue of software stability. On Windows 2000 with the SP4+ stuff, I cannot use USB 2.0 (scanner software looses communications with the scanner, and restarting the software leads to a blue screen of death). I also have to restart the software after each roll of film (approximately) or the application crashes. I'm going to try XP one of these days and see if it's any better. Hard to say if it's Nikon or MS that is screwing this up. Probably a joint effort.
Update: now running on a fast machine with XP Pro SP2, USB2.0 - after solving the XP ROC-GEM problem, I can report that the software is reasonably stable, typically going several rolls or sets of slides without crashing. There are no system crashes under XP, just application faults. Slide scans take around a minute to 90 seconds each in the stack feeded.
One drawback of the slide feeder over the film strip batch scanner is that there is no way to do different scan settings for the slides in the stack. With film strips you can tweak the settings for each frame, but there is no preview capability in the batch scan from the slide feeder. This is an oversight that they could correct in the software. However, the feeder reverses the slide order, so you would have to restack the slides between the preview pass and the full scan pass, or the software would have to be smarter than Nikon.
So I just use a default of ICE on and DEE of 30 and rescan manually any very difficult shots. With the 16-bit channel depth (actually only 14 unless you do multisampling - correction, the 5000 does 16-bit scanning with or without multisampling, the V is 14-bit) most exposure and shadow/highlight problems can be compensated in Photoshop afterwards.
All in all, I give Nikon a C for this effort - they could do some software improvements to raise the grade to a B- with a preview option, and possibly get a real solid B if they modified the pressure plate (needs to be adjustable where the pressure is placed). But the horizontal stack design will always have jamming problems. Why they couldn't use a tray feed with an open acceptance path like working slide projectors is beyond me.
71 of 71 people found the following review helpful
Feed problem solution
3 Feb 2006
I have been scanning about 3000 family slides over the past year with a Super Coolscan 5000 ED and an SF-210. For the first 2000 slides I often had trouble with slides jamming during a feed especially if I had more than about 15 slides in the feeder. I decided that the root problem was that the feedspring pressure increased with the number of slides stacked in the feeder and that at a certain point this excessive pressure was the principal reason for a misfeed/jam. So...the solution was to pull the feed pusher way back to a dis-engage position, take the entire scanner and tilt it about 12 degrees off horizontal, and use a C-size battery and gravity to roll it down against the slides to provide a constant feed pressure. This has made a huge difference! I wish I knew about this when I first got this feeder. Let me know if this works for you.
57 of 57 people found the following review helpful
works for me :-)
17 Jan 2006
When I bought the SF-210, I was fully prepared to hate it. The only thing I would hate more was to sit there and feed the scanner slide after slide after slide. (I had a big project for which I had to scan many slides.)
So I DID buy the SF-210 in spite of all the negative reviews because it is the only slide feeder for the coolscan. I actually read the manual and took some time adjusting the "feeder adjustment plate." I found that as long as I only scanned cardboard slides in good shape, it worked well. I also went ahead and built up the upper edge with some tape like another reviewer recommended (=where the slides to be scanned are resting). The occasional plastic slide I fed manually. Once I had this "after-market improvement" done, it went great.
The manual warns not to use slides with labels on them - all my slides are labeled. It still worked, although I did make sure that no sticky corners were showing. Also, I used the settings one reviewer suggested and tweaked all batch scans to a DEE of 25, ICE on, and Unsharp Mask off.
Maybe I was just lucky, but the project is done and the SF-210 worked well. I admit that the whole thing feels wobbly and the magazine cover is ridiculously flimsy. The reason why I think it is worth only 3 stars is this: I paid $400 for a flimsy tool, which could have been better designed. In this price range I should not have to build up the upper edge with tape (thereby preventing a second slide getting dragged into the feeder).
So I DID buy the SF-210 in spite of all the negative reviews because it is the only slide feeder for the coolscan. I actually read the manual and took some time adjusting the "feeder adjustment plate." I found that as long as I only scanned cardboard slides in good shape, it worked well. I also went ahead and built up the upper edge with some tape like another reviewer recommended (=where the slides to be scanned are resting). The occasional plastic slide I fed manually. Once I had this "after-market improvement" done, it went great.
The manual warns not to use slides with labels on them - all my slides are labeled. It still worked, although I did make sure that no sticky corners were showing. Also, I used the settings one reviewer suggested and tweaked all batch scans to a DEE of 25, ICE on, and Unsharp Mask off.
Maybe I was just lucky, but the project is done and the SF-210 worked well. I admit that the whole thing feels wobbly and the magazine cover is ridiculously flimsy. The reason why I think it is worth only 3 stars is this: I paid $400 for a flimsy tool, which could have been better designed. In this price range I should not have to build up the upper edge with tape (thereby preventing a second slide getting dragged into the feeder).
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