Nikon CoolScan V ED Film Scanner

Easy to install and setup. Had it working within ten minutes after it came out of the box. Instruction manual easy to understand and it came with a quick start guide. A strip of four negatives utilizing ICE software takes about five minutes to scan. Scanning strips is done in auto mode and is a great convenience. Noise level is minor. Very satisfied with scanned images and operation of this film scanner.

The coolscan V ED has been discontinued with no evident replacement in sight. As such, they are getting hard to find and the price seems to be going up (ie Adorama). You can still get them from Bestbuy for MSRP, plus tax and $6.00 shipping. Not such a bad deal. I may still opt for the 5000 and return my V that is en route. Any thoughts?? Actual review to follow.

UPDATE: Returned this scanner and got the 5000 with the F-210 batch scanner. So far, so good. Tracking resale prices on E-bay makes spending more to get the 16 bit scanner seem worth the price differential. The scans of some of my older slides are just simply breathtaking. Hope this helps.

I've just used this item briefly, however the slide scanning function is simple and easy.
As i understand it this item is supposed to correct for dirt, spots, scatches etc however I have not been able to see that as yet.
The scanned slides still required a lot of cleanup with Photoshop.
Small, functional and yeilds much better results than my flatbed scanner.

The software was intuitive and easy to set up. The quality of the scans is outstanding. I shoot a late model DSLR, and was surprised to see that this Nikon scanner produced nearly equivalent quality photos from my older film negatives (at least the good quality ones!) The digital ice, grain reduction and light leveling software were reasons for the excellent results (along with excellent optics). There were only two issues. Similar to a past Nikon digital camera, this scanner tends to exaggerate the red colors, which I had to tone down in Photoshop (but could be done with the scanning software). The scanner is also quite slow when scanning negatives. I was using a brand new 2.66 duo core IMAC with 4GB of RAM, and it took nearly 5 minutes per negative to scan and save the photo. I expected that scanning at 4000 dpi and using the digital ice and grain reduction would increase the time of the scan, but was surprised that saving the photo to the hard disk also took a long time. It is possible that the software was not optimized for Mac in general (it looks like a ported PC program) or that it was not optimized for the latest operating system (OS 10.5). These 2 issues aside, I was quite pleased with the quality of the scans and the ease of setup. I recommend this product (and a good book to read between scans).

I really like the scanner. We are enjoying our old slides that have been collecting dust, now that they are on the computer. The Digital ICE4 Advanced suite of image correction is just wonderful. I would not buy/use any scanner that would not have this. Scanning takes time, especially as you need to scan single slide at a time, but worth it.