Technical Issues — Photographica
LS-2000 Film Scanner Review
December 1998

want to get into the digital age–the sooner the better. It's not that I don't love analog imaging. It's not that I don't see the superiority of image quality in present day analog imaging. I want to get into the digital age because, well, I'm lazy and cheap. I'm tired of traipsing off to take film to be processed. I'm tired of paying for film and processing. I'm tired of retouching digitized film images to get them ready for the web or e-mail.
   
    This is why my walking around camera has become my Olympus 600-L digital camera. My film and processing costs have gone down drastically, and it takes significantly less time to get my images web ready. Most of what I have put on the web in the last six months has been taken with this camera.Yet in many respects this is still just a toy camera. I don't have the ability to control depth of field. I can't get long exposure times. I can't manually focus and the auto focus is funky in low light. The dynamic range is actually lower than transparency film. But for standard issue images, this camera is great.
    
    I've heard that IBM has 2 and 2.5 megapixel CCD's which will be common in the next generation of affordable digital cameras. Until then, I'm stuck in the analog world. I have tried to archive some of my images to Photo CD. This has worked out well, but this images dust, dirt, and lint (and it's about $2.50/image). That's one of the major problems with scanning these small 35 mm images–dust is big relative to the image size. Using a flat bed scanner would reduce these "artifacts" (that's what we call schmootz in the radiography world). But the dynamic range of flat bed scanners is limited. If you are willing to pull out your checkbook drum scans of custom prints would be a possibility. But as mentioned above, pulling out the old checkbook is painful.
    
    But pull out the check book I did. My newest purchase is the Nikon LS-2000 35mm negative and slide scanner. I have been resisting this move for a long time based on the recommendation of thedude.com, who said the results from an earlier version of this scanner were poor, and it required too much work. But I saw a short review in my Farber workshop (David Hatton) and a longer review on the web that convinced me to try.
   
    First, let's talk about my cheapness. This is not an inexpensive scanner. I bought it for about $1650 at B&H. But if I'm using this as my main archive, it will pay for itself in less than 1000 images. (Except that those images have to go somewhere other than my hard drive. Jim has assured me we can get them onto CD very inexpensively.)
 
   Now let's talk about my laziness. The last thing I want to do is spend all my free time feeding slides, adjusting levels and contrast, and touching up artifacts. Although it costs over $400, I bought the optional slide feeder. I can insert up to 50 slides and let it do it's thing. Using the factory defaults so far has given very accurate results. But the most amazing thing about this scanner is the so called ICE™ technology. This scanner can determine the dust, dirt, and lint and eliminate them on the scan. This adds processing time, and the resulting images are slightly softer, but if you've ever spent thirty minutes using the clone tool to eliminate dust, you'll understand. The softness can be improved with an on board sharpening, but we decided that Photoshop does a better job with the unsharp masking tool. Add to that a D-max of 3.6 (the highest at this price range) and a clean user interface, and you've got a great tool. Two thumbs up (mine and www.thedude.com's). Now send me a usable, professional digital camera for under $2000 and I'll sell you this scanner. Cheap. Really, hey.