1 Slide Scanners 2 Bit Depth 3 Color Accuracy ... Sharpness ...Focusing ... Speed ... Drivers ... Set-up ... The Bundle 4 Prices

Color Accuracy At default: - The Nikon LS-1000 produced accurate blues, reds and greens and good skin tones. - The Olympus ES-10 produces good color, but you may have to make adjustments in driver to achieve it. SHARPNESS The Nikon LS-2000 and the Olympus ES 10 both produced acceptably sharp scans. (See below under Focusing for the depth of field problem with the Nikon.) The Olympus ES-10 had multicolor artifacting between the light and dark areas, which produced an appearance of greater sharpness than the Nikon's uniform gradations (see enlarged detail.) FOCUSING The Olympus ES-10 has assisted manual focus; you pick an area of sharp contrast and turn the knob on the scanner until the driver control bar tells you it is in optimum focus. After that, for the rest of session, you normally will not have to refocus unless you use a different type of slide mount. The depth of field of the Olympus scanner seens to be great enough that you do not have to worry about the curvature of film. To get the best focus with the Nikon scanners, you need to select an area of sharp contrast AND you must also to pick the area of the image you want to be in sharpest focus, because the Nikon scanners do not seem to have sufficient depth of field to produce a sharp focus if there is more than very slight curvature in the film. (Most film in slide mounts bellies outward on the base side. The amount of curl depends on the type and age of the film and the humidity; the drier the air the more film curls.) This can be such a problem with the Nikon that I sometimes scan an image twice or three times with the focus set for different places on the film, then layer the images in Photoshop and combine the sharp areas from each. SPEED OF OPERATION The Nikon makes three passes each for preview, focus, and scan and the Nikon plug-in must be reopened after every scan. (When you use Nikon's overscanning or the defect removal technology, the scan time multiplies.) You do not see the final scan until it has been completed. ... The one-pass Olympus ES-10 does a very fast preview and interactive focus, and then a 30 second scan. The image appears on the monitor as the scan is being done. The plug-in stays open after a scan. All of this means a much faster overall speed of operation with the Olympus ES-10 than with the Nikon scanners. DRIVERS The Nikons have had poorly designed drivers that have gotten worse with the new LS-2000. ... The Olympus driver is very user-friendly and yet powerful, but surprisingly you cannot crop before you scan. SET-UP The Olympus ES-10 comes configured for either Mac's SCSI or the printer port of Windows machines. ... The Olympus would be plug and play for SCSI were it not that the Olympus driver does not seem able to distinguish between the internal and external SCSI chains. The scanner comes set for 5, and even though the scanner shows up in a SCSI Probe in the external chain at address 5, the scanner driver cannot find it there if there is an internal device at address 5, even though this is a separate bus. Internal Zip drives are always factory set for SCSI address 5. It is very easy to reset the SCSI address on the scanner to another number that is not being used by a device on the internal chain, and all will be well. THE BUNDLE The Olympus ES-10 come with cables for either Mac SCSI, or the Windows printer port. There is a driver and additional software for either Mac or Windows, including Adobe PhotoDeluxe. There is a carrier for 35 mm slides and a carrier for negatives. A carrier is sold separately for the new APS (Advanced Photo System) cartridges. Next: Pricing

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