Cheap (ie used) film scanner

Last week I landed a Nikon Coolscan III from eBay and if anyone wants to se the results they should look at the Which Farnborough? thread in historical.
A few thoughts that might help anyone like me with thousands of slides and negatives, summed up from my own experience, the professional photographers I work with, and a fair bit of web searching…
Up to now I’ve used an Epson 2480 flat bed scanner with a transparency/film adapter. I’ve always been very happy with the results, but it has to be said that the Nikon takes things to a new level altogether when used at its highest quality settings.
Coolscan IIIs seem to go for anything between £75 and £140-ish on eBay, which is a fair old spread. If you are wanting to use one with a Mac, then no problems. A PC running XP can be a little more tricky: you’ll need a SCSI card, which should be included in the sale (allow a tenner on eBay if it isn’t) and obviously you need to be happy about installing it.
The Nikon software won’t run on XP with the SP2 service pack, either. Either use a later version or third-party software like Vuescan (which is the route I’ve gone down as Vuescan is highly intuitive and much easier to use that the Nikon software anyway).
The other fly in the ointment is that Coolscan IIIs will be about seven or eight years old, and there are two known problems. The one I bought had both.
The grease lubricating the moving parts can gum up and needs to be wiped clean and replaced ,and the main mirror can become very dusty, lending a bloom to scans which can be very arty in the right places and a PITA in the wrong places.
The Coolscan III dismantles into large lumps fairly easily allowing you to do the work. It’s a question of whether you are confident taking the screwdrivers to a piece of precision equipment. I started my working life screwing (and unscrewing) satellites and missiles (oh the joys of Black Arrow X3 and tracked Rapier…) so a mass market scanner holds relatively few terrors, but not everyone’s the same.
Maybe for PC owners a Coolscan IV might be an easier solution with its USB connection, but you’ll pay more too. But there’s nothing to be too frightened of, and the results, particularly with the infra-red dust elimination (which works to some degree with Kodachrome despite what the experts say) can be brilliant.

William

Postscript: After more tries with Kodachrome, the results should better be described as unpredictable. The digital ICE removes dust from areas of sky very well, but it also does its best to eliminate small dark areas of the image. Maybe experimentation is called for…