filmscanners: Brief review of LS-4000

[Dieder Bylsma <dbylsma@bigfoot.com>]

Just thought I'd pipe in with my own two pfennings,yen,cents, 
whatever about the LS-4000 now that I have one in my paws.

One of my biggest concerns in purchasing this scanner was that the 
scanner would be a 'domestic' version for Japan only, i.e. it's power 
supply would only be for 100 V 50/60 Hz. Well, As Ed Hamrick 
mentioned a while back wrt the USB LS-40 and as I've confirmed, the 
scanner comes with a multi-voltage power supply. Good for 100-240 V 
50/60 Hz. First problem solved. =)

The second problem is one that I'm working through by carefully 
reading the documentation (multiple language documentation on a 
separate CD and a single-language install (Japanese) on the other CD) 
and fiddling with the buttons and options. Looks like this scanner 
has a lot of potential here. Yikes, a veritable plethora of options 
compared to the LS-30 or the LS-2000.


Strip film adapter
------------------

The film handling of the strip film feeder looks like it has been 
significantly improved over the take up spool method of the 
LS-30/LS-2000. Instead of the film being drawn into a roll within the 
film feeder adapter, it is pulled into the scanner and from what I 
can determine, stays flat within the scanner. Because the LS-4000 has 
a roll-film adapter (which I'll be purchasing once my wallet recovers 
from the LS-4000), it has a straight-through path from front to back. 
The film is inserted into the film feeder at an oblique angle of 
about 30 degrees off vertical instead of the 90 degree (horizontal) 
approach of the LS-30/LS-2000. It pulls the strip completely within 
the scanner and there it stays until you're finished with that strip. 
I haven't tried it with a 6 frame negative strip yet, but with the 4 
frame negative strip, while scanning any of the frames, the film 
strip stays within the innards of the scanner. When the film strip is 
ejected after being in the scanner for a while, it shows no sign of 
curling as in the LS-30/LS-2000. This is great news. =)

When using the strip film feeder, as with the LS-30/LS-2000 there are 
two options for thumbnails...either numbered without a thumbnail 
preview or numbered with a thumbnail preview with frame numbers. 
Unlike the LS-30/LS-2000 series though, with the LS-4000 it does not 
show the correct number of thumbnails in the non-preview mode and 
always shows 6 frames. This is corrected once you choose the 
thumbnail & preview option. Ditto for the roll film adapter...all 
rolls will show as 40 frames until you do a preview. This is 
documented in the PDF documentation.

The machine is very quiet and the advancing of the film is much much 
more quiet than the the LS-30/LS-2000.

Another quirk is that despite the scanner being a firewire scanner 
(IEEE 1394/iLink), it has only one port, which means it has to be at 
the end of a firewire chain. Nikon recommends against using Firewire 
hubs with the scanner. They do include with the machine a PCI 
Firewire card so the presence or absence of a firewire port in your 
PC/Mac shouldn't be an obstacle to using the scanner. That being 
said, unless I want to install the PCI card into my machine this 
means my firewire options are limited by the lack of firewire 
pass-through/daisy-chain options.



Scanning
--------

Doing thumbnail scans and previews is remarkably swift. If you want 
to do quick adjustments etc, it's easy enough to do. As mentioned 
above, there's a load of options not available in the previous 
incarnation of the software. Incidentally, the software can be used 
for the LS-30/LS-2000.

Now for NikonScan tidbits. It helps considerably if you have gobs and 
gobs of RAM. Even with the fastest of machines, with the size of 
images it can produce (14 bit 4000 dpi of a ~35mm negative frame 
gives ~120Mb file sizes), it will take all the memory it can get its 
hands on. Because I have a Mac, I can set the memory allocation for 
the NikonScan software, whereas with Windows, you will rely on the OS 
to keep up with the ballooning demands of the scanning software.

To push the software and the scanner a bit, I scanned a negative at 
4000 dpi, 16x multi-sampling, 14 bit colour, with Digital ICE enabled 
in its 'normal' mode and then used GEM (Grain Reduction) set for the 
default of 3 (on a 0-5 scale). The first time I did that, it took 
over 40 minutes from start to finish. This was because I had not 
increased the memory allocation from its paltry default (think about 
70Mb?) and it was spooling the 121+ MB file to and from the scratch 
drive (a nice fast 7200 rpm IBM drive). Bumping up the RAM allocation 
to 580Mb and redoing the scan, the improvement in scan time was 
considerable. I think it was reduced by at least 2/3 to about 15 
minutes or so. This is not something I would do on a regular basis 
since 4000 dpi is well in excess of my normal needs, but at least it 
gives some idea of how long it could take.

Grain Reduction and Restoration of Colour are CPU-bound processes. 
They do not rely on the scanner for anything and take up the bulk of 
the time for generation of a picture. NikonScan has a long way to go 
before it approaches Photoshop's ability to handle 100+Mb picture 
files when displaying large image files like this. I am surprised by 
how long it took on my machine since it was a Dual Processor G4 with 
a fair amount of RAM (640Mb), so I'm assuming that NikonScan hasn't 
been optimized for the G4 nor is it MultiProcessor aware (The G4 has 
a special vector math unit ideal for manipulation of matrices of data 
such as what is found in graphics -- which is why Apple always shows 
off how fast its machines are using a G4 and Photoshop which is 
optimized for the G4). I would presume the corollary that NikonScan 
isn't optimized for the PC versions of 'AltiVec' (3DNow by AMD I 
believe?).


Results
-------

The results of the scan are quite amazing, but I'm not sure about 
what I should compare this against, so I will post some review shots 
of the scanner later. Right now the biggest barrier for me for 
further exploration of the scanner is that the software is all in 
Japanese, so this is slowing me down somewhat.

more later...if anybody wants to see what the scanner can do with a 
calibrated slide (Q60?) I'd be glad to help out, 'cept I don't have a 
Q60 here. Snail mail is fine though and I'd return it back to the 
sender as soon as I received it.


Dieder
-- 
Dieder Bylsma                 |
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