Digital Image Scanners – Nikon Super Coolscan 8000ED Film and Slide Scanner Test Images

(NOTE that this is NOT the identical “Musicians” image
as used in our digital cameras test! It’s very similar, but the models
are different, and the digital-camera version is a couple of reproduction
generations removed from this particular version.)

Our Musicians slide is getting a little grundgy from several years
use now, so you can see some very fine-grained dirt on the image here.
Compare this image (492k), scanned with the
Digital ICE defect-removal feature engaged. The dirt and a few minor
scratches completely disappear, with remarkably little cost in sharpness.
(In fact, there’s so little loss of sharpness we’re hard pressed to
find it. When we first opened these shots in Photoshop to examine them,
we at first mistakenly thought the one with ICE was the one without,
and actually had ourselves convinced that it was the sharper. Now, we
think we can see a few places where the ICE shot is softer, but wouldn’t
want to submit to a double-blind test!) This is an excellent illustration
of Digital ICE in a more practical example than with our heavily-damaged
negative film used in the main review. This level of grundge is pretty
typical of what you’d find when dealing with older film in a production
environment. If this were a job for pay, Digital ICE would have saved
us a good 30 minutes or more of careful spotting in Photoshop.

Interestingly, we did notice that the Super Coolscan 8000 ED seemed much less susceptible to dust and scratches than the 4000 was. They both use an LED illumination system, so we’d expect the illuminator optics to be similar. Given the significantly lower sensitivity of the 8000 to dust though, we’d conclude that the 8000’s illumination system is different somehow, perhaps resulting in more diffuse, less collimated light striking the film.

Consistent with what we observed with the dirt on the Musicians slide,
the 8000 proved much less susceptible to the tiny chemical flecks/emulsion
defects on this slide. (Most scanners show tiny white specks across
the image.) You can still see signs of them, but they’re overall not
too objectionable. When we engaged the “Digital ICE” defect-removal
software though, the light flecks completely disappeared, as
shown in this image (478k), with very
little disturbance to the underlying image. – In fact, perhaps due to
the 8000’s more diffuse-seeming light source, we saw none of the artifacts
around the louvers that Digital ICE introduced in the Super Coolscan
4000 scans of this image. The Nikon Scan 3 software has an unsharp masking
option in it, which we didn’t play with too much, preferring to do any
sharpening in Photoshop, which is much more interactive, and gives you
more controls to work with. Here’s
(494k) an example of the Digital ICE-processed image with fairly strong
unsharp masking (0.8 pixels, 147%) applied in Photoshop.

The Super Coolscan 8000 ED did an excellent job with this, about what
we’d expected, given the superlative results of it’s little brother
the 35mm-only Super Coolscan 4000 ED. The default autoexposure settings
produced this (516k) very dark image.
Some work with the curves control panel brightened things nicely, producing
this (764k) image at 8 bit scanning
depth, and this (730k) almost identical
one at 14 bits (reduced to 8 bits in Photoshop for ‘web display as a
JPEG file). Turning on the 16x multi-sampling produced these 8-bit
(771k) and 14-bit (753k) results.
As shown in the main review text, we did notice the banding in the image
that the 8000’s “Super Fine” mode (1-line) scanning is intended
to eliminate. Turing on that option (and watching our 8-bit scan times
rocket up from 4m16s to 17m12s), we obtained these 8-bit and 14-bit
results. Again, we saw relatively little difference between 8 and 14
bits, even when playing with the tone curves quite a bit in Photoshop.
– The default rendering of the 14 bit file in Photoshop was a shade
lighter, and we could just about convince ourselves we saw a little
extra shadow detail, but it’s equally possible that the differences
were more imagined than real, they were that slight.

Some folks on the internet have settled on using a crop of the woman’s
face in the upper right-hand corner of this slide as a reference for
detail and resolution. To help with people making comparisons with scanners
we haven’t reviewed yet, we offer this crop
(148k) of that area, captured by the Super Coolscan 8000 ED at its maximum
4000 dpi resolution.

WG-18 Resolution Target Horizontal Clip: (6×7 cm) (188k)

Whooee! While it’s hard for long-time 35mm stalwarts like ourselves to admit it, medium-format film certainly captures a LOT more detail, as evidenced by the Super Coolscan 8000 ED’s maximum-resolution results on this shot!

The full WG-18 resolution target is very large (see below), so we cropped-out these clips to show the scanner resolution on this familiar target. There are two different targets here. The 35mm one was shot on Kodak Technical Pan black & white negative film. This film is extremely fine-grained, with perhaps the highest resolution of any commercially-available 35mm emulsion. The target was shot with a Nikon 50mm, f1.4 lens (a notably sharp lens), at an aperture of f8. Thus, while not a “laboratory” grade target, this represents about as much detail as you’ll ever see in a conventional 35mm film image. The downside of this target is that the Tech Pan emulsion is a little “thin,” lacking density. It is thus difficult to set scanners properly to produce adequate contrast to separate the finest details without losing critical information.

The 6×7 target was shot on Fuji Velvia transparency film, a very fine-grained color emulsion. We didn’t record full details on that one, but do recall that it was shot with a Mamiya RZ-67, using a Mamiya lens of around 200mm focal length. (250mm?) It was also stopped-down a fair bit, to hopefully be within the lens’ optimum aperture range. We’re less familiar with medium-format lenses, so can’t say how this compares to the ultimate attainable with a 6×7 camera. The amount of detail captured, relative to what we’re used to seeing in 35mm scans is certainly impressive, however.

The Super Coolscan 8000 ED did very well with this target, producing very crisp, sharply-focused scans from both targets. The resolution is excellent, with detail clearly discernable to 2000 lines per picture height. By comparison, the Super Coolscan 4000 ED goes to 1800 lines and beyond.

A side note though: We did have quite a bit of trouble with this piece of film, because the masking strips used in the clamshell holder were too thick. We ended up scanning it with no masking strips, in order to get it to lie flat. (See the main text of the review, discussing the film holders, for more information.)

WG-18 Resolution Target Vertical Clip: (6×7 cm) (202k)

Here’s the corresponding vertically-oriented clip of the WG-18/Kodak Tech Pan target.Essentially identical to the horizontal clip above.

NOTE! ->

WARNING:
This JPEG expands into a 60.5 megabyte file, which will almost
certainly crash your broswer if viewed directly! To view it, you must
first download it directly to your hard drive (right-click in Windows,
click & hold in Mac Netscape), then open it in an image-editing
application. here is the link to the
RAW JPEG IMAGE. (No surrounding HTML file, 2.5 megabyte download.) (For
the real masochists, here’s
a copy of the full-frame 6×7 res target scan, a 9.7 megabyte download,
which expands into a 262(!) megabyte file.)