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Driver: The Coolscan
8000 ED ships with Nikon's Scan 3.1 software
driver, a powerful scanning utility that includes
advanced color management, curve, color balance,
and sharpening tools. |
SOFTWARE
DRIVER HEAVEN
Nikon's Scan 3.1 software utility can be opened
as a stand-alone program (or scanning applet,
as Nikon dubs it), or as a Photoshop compatible
plug-in on the Mac and a TWAIN driver on the PC.
It's a powerful driver with an easy-to-use interface
that even a novice scanner operator could master
in short order. However, advanced users will be
thrilled by the powerful controls (often found
on pull down menus or with a single click of a
control button) that allow you to adjust nearly
every aspect of a scan and control the ICE, ROC,
and GEM utilities plus curve adjustment dialogs,
manual focus, and sharpening tools.
Thumbnail
image previews are generated quickly so you can
choose which frame to prescan. The 35mm film holder
can contain two strips of film with six frames
each, but it takes only 22 seconds to generate
each thumbnail and 54 seconds to get a full-screen
preview. The preview window can be scaled to fit
the size of your monitor—a real plus—while most
controls pop up around the preview. Several buttons
are located on the left side of the preview window,
and these give you quick access to manual focus,
exposure and zoom controls, input and output resolutions,
color bit-depth, and color model and film format
menus. A toolchest menu screen gives you additional
access to a number of controls including layouts,
cropping, curves, unsharp mask, analog gain, and
an LCH (luminance, chrominance, hue) editor.
Nikon
Scan 3.1 has advanced color management controls
that allow you to choose working color spaces
and attach scanner profiles to images. When used
as a plugin filter in Photoshop 6, we were happy
to see that preview images closely matched the
way the final scan appeared in Photoshop. In addition,
many scan-control settings can be saved for future
use, and Nikon also allows you to save NEF (Nikon
Electronic image Format) images. With NEF files,
you can adjust curve, color balance, and unsharp
masking settings. All of the adjustments can be
saved, and then turned off if you desire.
TEST
RESULTS ARE IN
We ran the Coolscan 8000 ED through a wide variety
of tests and fiddled with nearly every control
to see how this scanner performed. As mentioned
earlier, several settings increased scan times
significantly while reducing retouching time later.
But this scanner is a speed demon when Digital
ICE, ROC, and GEM are turned off. In 48-bit color
mode, we got full-frame 35mm previews in only
33 sec and 4000 ppi scans in just 4 min 11 sec.
Scans of 120 format film were also very fast:
a full frame at 48-bit color took just 7 min 12
sec and produced a 343MB file, while a 16X multisample
dragged scanning times out to 26 min and 10 sec.
(Still, that's less time than it takes to drive
to the service bureau for a scan.)
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