At 23:36 02-06-01 +0200, Manfred E. Bendisch wrote:
>today I've received my new Nikon LS-4000. What a difference compared to my
>old HP photosmart.
>The problem is that the Nikon scanner software (Nikon Scan 3.0) constantly
>crashes, especially
>when I try to use ICE or other advanced features. I'm running Windows 98
>Second Edition.
>Any ideas what might be wrong?
I picked up my Nikon LS-4000 in Atlanta on Tuesday and am still getting
familiar with it. I found that NikonScan is very unstable when used
stand-alone. It can scan only one time and then it crashes. However, when I
use its TWAIN module inside of Photoshop 6 it never crashes. I'm scanning a
40-year-old badly faded filmstrip with everything turned on, ICE, GEM, and
especially ROC. The results so far have enthralled me. The original frames
are so faded that they project in a dull nearly monochromatic reddish tone.
The Nikon literally makes them look as good as new. I'll post some samples
on the Web in a few days for list members to check out.
Getting back to the crash issue: NikonScan (NS) appears to have serious
problems with both memory and disk management. I tried Vuescan on a few
slides and noticed that it saved files nearly twice as fast as NS did.
Photoshop also saves files much faster than NS does. And Vuescan didn't
crash, btw. Vuescan's equivalents to ROC and ICE are also much faster than
NS's routines.
I'm running Windows 2000/SP1 on a Dell Precision Workstation 420 with dual
933 MHz Piii CPUs and 768 MB RDRAM. Processing times are about 10% faster
than those listed in the Nikon manual. That's still pretty slow but an
acceptable trade-off for the magic that it does with damaged and faded
film. Oddly, after exiting NS and Photoshop the system has about 50 MB more
available RAM than it had before starting those applications. Despite that
interesting anomaly the system doesn't become unstable. However, this
indicates that NS has some serious bugs.
Some suggestions for Win98 users: place both the TEMP folder and the system
swapfile on any partition except C: (for efficiency) and make it a fixed
size to prevent fragmentation. You can find out how to do that on scores of
Windows performance tweak sites. Defrag your partitions before attempting
to do very large scans. Think about expanding RAM to 512 MB. That's the
maximum that Win98 can use because of a Microsoft bug that has never been
fixed. Create multiple Photoshop swap files on different partitions.
Upgrade to Win2K if possible.
A few initial impressions:
Don't try Digital ICE with Kodachrome. NS adds halos around the darker
shadow areas and is totally ineffective. Vuescan does a better job with
Kodachrome and doesn't have the halo problem.
Old Fujichrome slides appear slightly greenish when scanned but it's
correctable in PS.
Nikon should have provided a way to store the film adapters and not just
fragile plastic baggies. Given the price that I paid for the scanner this
is very tacky. They should provide a case for them plus a dust cover for
the scanner.
On all but Kodachromes ICE and ROC seem to work better in NS than in
Vuescan. I've scanned about 40 slides so far all of which needed ICE.
The FH3 strip film attachment holds even badly curved film flat and I'm not
seeing any edge sharpness issues so far.
More to come . . .
Cary Enoch Reinstein aka Enoch's Vision, Inc., Peach County, Georgia
http://www.bahaivision.com/ -- "Behind all
these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things.
The function of art is to reveal this radiance through the created object."
~Joseph Campbell
