Re: filmscanners: Nikon 8000ED nightmares!!!

[Arthur Entlich <artistic@ampsc.com>]

It would make sense that some people would experience worse banding than 
others if the information I received from several sources is correct.

Most scanners use a tri-line CCD sensor chip.  In all scanners I know of 
other than Nikon, this tri-line has filters over each line corresponding 
to R G and B.  Each line of the CCD is calibrated with each scan, so 
that all the sensor elements are properly adjusted for black and white 
points, which makes sense since they are probably independent, and you 
wouldn't want one sensor to be "hot" or "lazy", and create streaky color 
across your scan.

Nikon's lighting system uses no colored filters on the CCD sensors, 
instead changing the color of the light source (R G and B LED matrixes). 
  Therefore, they make use of all three CCD sensor lines at once.  In 
theory a good design that could triple the capture rate.

Only one problem. Nikon apparently decided to only calibrate on of the 
three CCD lines.  Therefore the other two can have sensors which are 
hotter or lazier than the calibrated one, and so, only one out of each 
three lines scanned in the default mode have been calibrated, and this 
would result in banding and pulsed streaking.

Now, if one was lucky, and their scanner happened to have a very even 
CCD, with all three lines having uniform sensors, then the banding would 
not show up.

Nikon's response to the problem for people who have CCDs that are not as 
well manufactured, is to suggest only using the one scanner line which 
is calibrated, turning of the other two.  This works well, but slows the 
scan down considerably.

Art

david soderman wrote:

> 
> 
> 
>>If you have not experienced banding how do you run the LS8000 ?  Is it in the
>>fine mode?   Which makes scanning slow.
>>
> 
> I've just been running it in the normal (not fine) mode.  At 4000 ppi w/ICE,
> 8 bit, 1 pass...a 6x6 neg takes about 10 minutes.  That's on a 400 mhz G4
> w/1.5 gigs of RAM.  I have virtual memory turned off.  I have maximum memory
> alloted to photoshop. (Just shy of 1 gig).  Don't know if it's possible to
> increase the amount of memory in NikonScan when used as a plugin.  I'm
> starting to think it isn't.
> 
> I'm a portrait photographer; not a scenic landscape photographer.  I haven't
> used the scanner all that much, but so far the banding hasn't been visible
> in the normal mode.
> 
> Aside from the hassles of using it, I really can't complain about the actual
> scan quality itself.  I'm quite impressed with the scan results.
> 
> Joyfully,  -david soderman- <>< 
> 
> .
> 
>