LaserSoft Imaging

The color handilng capabilities of Silverfast is just impeccable, nothing compares. However, for those of us fortunate enough to have a roll film adapter connected to our Coolscan 4000ED for batch scanning, the situation is rather unfortunate.

Under batch scanning, Silverfast seems to have no memory for frame positioning. Thus, after having prescanned all frames on the roll, the scanner once again runs the film all the way in and out, before positioning the frame for the final scan - and it also does that between each frame. In comparison, Nikon's NikonScan only needs to do this once, and never more. That's efficient use of the customer's precious time.

Another issue, when manually choosing several frames for prescanning, let's say five of the 36 frames, Silverfast do not retain the preview of the five prescanned pictures on the harddisk. If one chooses the first frame again, after having finished prescanning the fifth, Silverfast starts prescanning that first frame once again. In NikonScan, you can (if you really want) prescan all frames, and all frames will be retained in memory/on disk for individual image adjustments until the scanner driver is closed. That's nice Nikon.

Provided I haven't missed an option in the scanner software, I hope Silverfast soon improve their batch scanning features.

Just purchase Silver Fast. GREAT except!!!!! the film offset funciton does not work properly. Anybody the same problem.

I'm using the Nikon Super Coolscan 4000ED. the film offset function has *never* worked well although it was marginally improved at one point last year.

the scanner also has severe problems getting the frames positioned correctly while scanning whole strips or whole rolls of film. it almost makes batch scanning useless.

Nikon is releasing a new series of film scanners. I wonder if they'll improve the film handling; probably not. it might be time to take a look at the competition.

(I wish Nikon would glance at these forums once in a while)

New version of NikonScan supports the CS4000 and will be out in a week or two according to the European support site. Maybe there was a software fix. We can always hope!

Frank

Dear Oddgeir,

I could not reproduce your roll-back-and-forth problem under batch scan mode (but I had to test with an SA21 and a film strip).
Please tell me on which platform you work (OSX, OS9, WinXP, Win2000...) and if you work under SF_App/SF_Launcher or Photoshop.
If Photoshop, do you scan into Photoshop or directly to disk when you perform your batch scan?

If you want the previews to be saved, you can use our JobManager:
- make an overview of your film(-strip)
- add all images to the JobManager
- start edit of somel image from the JobManager
- preview this image
- stop edit or change to another image
- to process the images click on Start in the JobManager

But to work around a bug in the current SilverFast version, please
make sure to choose "Normal" in the ScanMode popup when you
want to preview images in the JobEdit mode (otherwise you will always
see the first image on your film(-strip).

Best regards
Martin M?nier

I could not reproduce your roll-back-and-forth problem under batch scan mode (but I had to test with an SA21 and a film strip).

(referring only to film offset positioning)
you probably won't see the offset problem as much with the SA21 as with the full roll feeder because the SA21 uses a different and more accurate method to move the film through the scanner.

Using JobManager resolved the problem with the roll film adapter running the film in and out unneccesary between each frame. It also retains the prescanned images on the harddisk.

Still, I have one VERY annonying problem left. I could not find a way to get a prescan of all the added images by a one click method. Instead I had to click the prescan button within each job-process, huh!! (and no, selecting all the images did not help either, it only prescans one job, not all jobs).

After much testing, the saving of image optimization parameters also seem to be in trouble. When changing the individual NegaFix settings for each job/image, Silverfast still seems to apply the same setting for all the jobs/frames nevertheless, leading to some images being overly under- or overexposed.

Although NikonScan have troubles with adjusting colors as well as Silverfast, it clearly excels over Silverfast regarding batch scans, and also if one regards ease of use as relevant.

Best,
Oddgeir Friborg