Nikon Super Coolscan LS 5000 ED review

Nikon pretty much dominates the high-end and semi-professional film scanner market, and the 5000 ED capably demonstrates why. Not only is quality exceptional, but the Nikon is also better designed.

Unlike other film scanners in which your slides or negatives are mounted in a plastic holder and then fed in, the Nikon takes film unmounted, mechanically drawing it into the body when you offer it up to the mechanism. This avoids the potential for damaging the negative while trying to manipulate it into a holder, which is often a danger. We recommend practising on a few non-critical negatives before feeding in your most precious film, though, since there's a bit of a knack to it.

Maximum optical resolution from the Coolscan is a heady 4,000ppi; with a 35mm negative, this allows for images of up to 5,670 x 3,780 pixels. In digital camera terms, that's 21 megapixels - equivalent to the output of medium-format digital backs.

Results from the Coolscan are extremely impressive. The high dynamic range allows it to extract shadow detail you may never have noticed was there, and the Digital ICE scratch reduction system works like magic. Digital ICE is a hardware feature developed by Kodak, shining infrared light onto the film to throw physical scratches and dust into relief. The infrared is picked up by the sensor separately from the normal red, green and blue channels and the output image is then treated accordingly, preserving detail that can be lost in software-based systems that have to guess which features of the image should be classified as scratches and dust.

The only drawback is that Digital ICE doesn't work with black-and-white film; the infrared light in conjunction with a black-and-white negative gives bizarre ultra-high contrast posterised results, which can initially lead to some head-scratching since it's switched on by default.

Post-processing also includes Digital ROC and Digital GEM. The first is a colour-restoration feature; the second aims to reduce the appearance of film grain (which is clearly resolved by the high-quality optics of this unit). Both work well enough, although the results from Digital ROC, while looking great and giving lots of vibrancy and saturation, looked artificial with our test negatives.

Speed is excellent, with a 4,000ppi, 16-bit scan taking just 44 seconds with processing and multipass sampling switched off. Granted, this scanner costs twice that of the other two here, and you don't get twice the quality as a result, but the difference is definitely noticeable. For semi-professional and serious amateur photographers, the Coolscan is the best around for under a thousand pounds.