Nikon Coolscan 9000 ED

Flatbed and Film Scanners
1

I was just gifted a Coolscan 9000, but I’m missing all the film holders. After doing some digging I ran across Stephen Scharf’s universal film holders, and promptly ordered one with a 135 and 120 mask. I have a couple questions regarding the 9000:

  1. What are your experiences with the Coolscan 9000 and NLP? I use Vuescan, but wanted to get some thoughts on best practices, as I have no experience with this particular scanner.

  2. Anyone have this scanner/ holder combo from Stephen Scharf? If so, how are the tolerances? I’ve heard the Coolscan is very picky with off brand holders.

    Thanks for everyone’s time!

2

I had one some years ago, having purchased it new. It was said to be one of the better scanners available at that time. I found, however, that it was painfully slow and very loud. I never used it with negatives, but only scanned a large collection of slides. I was pleased with the results. Good luck with it!

3

I am fairly sure the experience with any Coolscan is the same, as for myself I own a Coolscan IV ED and use it with Nikon Scan, scanning as positive and then inverting in NLP. It works well for me. I haven’t tried Vuescan especially as Nikon Scan is free and does the job just fine for me.

4

I am currently using everything you have listed: Coolscan 9000, VueScan, NLP and Stephan Scharf’s holders. I have made about 1500 scans with this setup.

I watched some videos on youtube with some people going through their process and settings to get myself situated with VS to produce raw files. If you need to troubleshoot the scanner mechanically - shtengel.com is a good resource - I used his step by step guide for cleaning the mirror. And he provided me a 3-d model and a guide for replacing the door flap that was missing on my scanner.

#1 - No issues 95% of the time - with some underexposed images I end up rescanning as TIFF files with the brightness increased in VS because they don’t convert well in NLP. The scanner and VS can be annoying because trial and error can be painfully slow. If you establish a workflow with the scanner set to automatically scan when tray is inserted, you can get your process moving along pretty well and multitask with other things on your computer - until you have to pause that workflow to start a new roll of film, or for a tricky underexposed negative you want to preview before scanning, or to change some settings with TIFF files - then everything becomes painfully slow.

#2 - Stephan Scharf’s holder is excellent, couldn’t recommend it more. Have never had an issue. He is very good at making these.