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About the Nikon 4000 ED Film Scanner
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Last Updated
19th of August, 2011
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The Nikon 4000ED is a remarkably sharp, capable scanner with 35mm film. It's not quite as sharp (particularly around the edges), or quite as good at penetrating the shadows as the Imacon, but it offers far superior automatic dust and scratch removal, and is a very cost effective solution.

We've scanned the images for a number of published books on the Nikon with great results. We have done literally thousands upon thousands of scans on the Nikon, and we really know how run this machine. Obviously we use much better software than the Nikon supplied software, for much more accurate colour, and our machine is regularly calibrated with an IT8 target to further improve colour response.

The Nikon has hardware based automatic dust and scratch removal.  This is the one area that the Nikon really excels in - the Digital ICE3 solution is remarkable and in 99% of all cases will leave you with a completely clean scan requiring absolutely no further spotting work. Really large scratches and fingerprints will not come out so well and will still require some manual work.

Contrary to popular web mythology, Digital ICE3 does NOT soften scans (and this is quite easily testable with two side by side scans that are pixel for pixel the same, except for dust!). Immediately around the dust itself there is very slight softening, almost always invisible to the eye under normal viewing, as is to be expected (the scanner interpolates the data where the dust was using the surrounding pixels). Digital ICE3 only works with colour dye based films - i.e. normal colour film like Velvia, Portra, and also chromagenic black and white films. It does not work with true black and white film (and film based on silver rather than dyes).
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