LaserSoft Imaging

Is Digital Ice, on the Nikon 9000 scanner, as effective as Silverfast for removing scratches and dirt, while retaining all the details of the Kodachrome slide? The reason I ask is that I own a Nikon 5000 scanner, and am tempted to invest in the 9000, since it has a more advanced form of Digital Ice than on the 5000. However, if Silverfast software performs this function better than Digi Ice on the 9000, I can keep my 5000 and save a lot of money in the process.

Pat Morrow

Dear Pat,

The only valid reason that should move you to upgrade from the Nikon 5000 to the Nikon 9000 is the size of your scanning material. If you are going to scan Mid size format, you would need to get the Nikon 9000, otherwise do yourself a favor and save some money by sticking to your Nikon Coolscan 5000.

The reason for this is because they are both top of the line, the 5000 on 35 mm scanning and the 9000 in Medium format, I believe their components quality to be the same (or pretty similar).

Cheers

Thanks for your reply, Alejandro.

When it comes to scanning Kodachromes, would you say that Silverfast software is simply equal to, or significantly better than the Digital Ice capability on the Nikon 9000 ? If you can describe or illustrate how it is better, in terms of ease of cleaning up dust/scratches, color correction, etc without degrading the sharpness of the image, that would help to make my mind up.

Thanks, Pat

The CS9000 has a modified ICE mode specifically for Kodachrome. It does not eliminate all of the issues with silver left in the slide, but from what i have read it seems to help some. Personally, i have only had about 10% of my Kodachromes have issue with ICE and these spanned 1950-1990 production runs.

If you are interested in the 9000, find one locally that you can rent or borrow some time on (sometimes colleges have one in the media lab) and test it out to see if you can see a difference.

The other advantage of the 9000 is there are wet mount kits available to use which can eliminate most of the dust and scratch issues optically with the fluid - so minimal if any ICE needed. You have to un-mount the slide of course.

Dear Pat,

Put in simple words, Kodachromes have a silver halide layer that prevents infrared light from going through the emulsion. The problem of infrared correction (either ICE or iSRD) is infrared light can generate artifacts in your pictures.

If you take one Kodachrome slide perpendicular to your eyes and against a light source you will see that one of the sides of the slide has a texture (generally created by the motive of the image itself). Infrared light can not tell that texture from the texture of dust or scratches.

That is when iSRD comes into the equation because you can work with layers and masks to determine which part will be affected by infrared light and which parts will be left out. You can also play with the amount of correction applied to every layer and you can also combine with software based scratch removal.

None of these options is possible using digital ICE, it is limited to on or off.

Its important to mention that iSRD for Nikon scanners is only available under Mac. SilverFast for windows will use the very same ICE module as Nikon does.

Cheers

I have scanned a few thousand Kodachrome slides on the coolscan 5000 with Digigital Ice on with no problems. As a check I would subtract the processed file with a scan that didn't go through ICE. Looked like it should. If you put a parameter in the Nikon scan software (don't remember which one) for ICE on high, then the resolution is degraded somewhat but still acceptable at the "snapshot" level. with the ICE strenght at normal on a 100Mb scan (4000 pixel/inch res) I see no degredation in sharpness when images examined at a couple of 100 percent.