Since Nikon discontinued its range of film scanners in 2008, they have become increasingly rare and expensive on the secondhand market. People even sell out of order scanners to repair working ones.
I was thus very lucky to find a Nikon Coolscan IV film scanner in perfect working condition at a reasonable price.
Work in Progress
I am now scanning my slides from 1999 - 2003 in order to update some of the galleries of France in Photos, especially Corsica and Brittany.
At the time, we were shooting slides, mostly Fuji Sensia and Provia. My favorite was the Provia 100f, which is very fine grained and thus easy to scan. We used an EOS 500n, then an EOS 30.
Both of them are now stored in boxes as we switched to digital in 2004 after a two year period during which we used slides for landscapes and digital for everything else.
Better quality
The photos already on this website were scanned with a Nikon LS 30. I was unable to start it again (SCSI issues) and it was full of dust. Using Vuescan, the Coolscan IV delivers pictures with a better resolution more accurate colors and better detail in the shadows and highlights. They do not look as sharp as the ones I got with the LS 30, maybe because of the magnification.
So you can expect new pictures that will have strange Exif data in the next few weeks.
