Thanks guys. The neg was in the right side up and wasn't too thin.
I will try it with the "ice" turned off as recommended in the FAQ link.
I may have had a bad connection with the neg adapter. I pulled it out and replaced it with the slide adapter, successfully scanned a slide and then went back to the neg adapter and did a successful neg scan...
Yea, I think you NEED to disable the ICE thingy. Hardware dust detection used an infrared light source to illuminate the dirt. Unfortunately, silver based film is opaque to IR, so the ICE goes haywire, thinking that all dense areas are gigantic blobs of dirt.
As a general rule, you can't use ICE (or Canon's similar FARE) with B&W or Kodachrome film. C41 and E6 chemistries are fine.
I had the same problem with mine - be sure to disable ICE. Then I found Vuescan software, which I now use instead of the kludgy Nikon software, which typically has problems interpreting the frame separators on many color positive films..
harrygilbert wrote:
I had the same problem with mine - be sure to disable ICE. Then I found Vuescan software, which I now use instead of the kludgy Nikon software, which typically has problems interpreting the frame separators on many color positive films..
How is Vuescan at some of the "restoration" functions that NikonScan offers with the use of hardware such as ICE4? What about the all-software functions like GEM and aged-film colour correction? Does Vuescan directly use ICE (ie. the infrared pre-scan) or just an algorithm to remove "suspected" dust?
I already have to use the Vuescan-driver kludge to get NikonScan to run under Vista x64 and I forsee even more problems with Win7 since it appears that Nikon is abandoning the Coolscans. I only scan old film so I need things like ICE and aging correction.
Download a trial version and test it. The "pro" version (which I bought) has all the features the Nikon software offers (including the infrared dust removal - "ICE") and also offers multiple simultaneous output.
Hi Vuescan uses the infrared channel for cleaning.You can also scan to a raw file and do adjustements later on without having to rescan your valuable film.It can also
process digital raw files from most cameras as far as I remember
I'm also finding that Vuescan offers a lot of color balance flexibility if you wish to do that while scanning. I'm going through 6,000 30-year old slides (combination of Kodachrome, Ektachrome, and Agfachrome), and it's a joy to just dial in the film brand and select the color balance based on the shot's ambient lighting. Makes post-processing a lot easier. I just batch process through Neat Image, and then into Photoshop.
And right in the middle of that task, my wife wanted a multi-page document scanned on my flat-bed and converted to PDF and OCR - which Vuescan did easily and accurately. Probably the best $79 investment I've made in a long time.
