I am going to purchase a film scanner and have narrowed the choice to either the Nikon Coolscan 2000 or the Minolta Elite. They both have similar technical specs, but the Nikon is priced about $500 higher. Does anyone have an opinion as to which is better. My 35 mm equipment is Nikon, and am very happy with it.

-- Bill Ossmann (wossmann@concentric.net), January 15, 2000

Answers

You need to take a slide to a dealer and have scans made on both scanners and compare them. Use a slide with a lot of shadow detail. Both have multi-sampling ability. You can get silverfast scanning software for the nikon. I recently purchased the minolta scan speed scanner, and am quite happy with the results. The results are quite comparable to the nikon coolscan. I am however using the software avialiable from ed hamrick which allows multipass scanning. The results are very good indeed.

-- jonathan ratzlaff (jonathanr@clrtech.bc.ca), January 16, 2000.

Bill Ossmann, Please take the time to check with your store to see if they're willing to allow you some sample scans. If you see them on the monitor, and they print them out for you at 8x10, let us know here that it was possible. I have friends that have been having a very hard time getting scans for testing film scanners. They don't do it. And they laugh at printouts and tell us to spend $2000 instead, with no refund policy, and no possibliity of exchange, only their in store credit.

-- Jeff Epstein (nospam@noemail.com), January 17, 2000.