LS-2000 vs V700 – Ancient Scanner Wins
April 18, 2011
I picked up an ancient Nikon LS-2000 dedicated 35mm film scanner the other day. It seems people are practically giving them away because they require a scsi card and the know-how to get them running on modern systems. I managed to get mine installed on my Windows 7 system by hacking some drivers (directions found at planetamd64.com and using Hamrick’s Vuescan. And boy am I glad I did! Here are the drivers I hacked to get the Adaptec 2902/2906 working (80kb zip file download).
I picked up the little scanner for $250 with the scsi card from a local seller. He’s owned it for the last 10 years or so and it’s very well looked after with the box and everything. I had a hunch that the scanner would outperform my Epson V700 for scanning 35mm film and I was correct. The ancient dedicated film scanner wipes the floor with my V700.
The dedicated film scanner was not only picking up detail the V700 was incapable of resolving, but it also picked up the film grain. This is a scan of some ancient formula Efke. The difference is like night and day. It was much faster too, scanning a 35mm image at 2700 dpi in about 30 seconds, including the auto-focus. This has been a very good $250 spent.
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[...] 35mm Distagon T* 2.0. I think this image is what stood out from them all. Scanned with the LS-2000 I recently acquired. And holy crap! My 35mm Zeiss has gone up in price by almost $300 to $1100 [...]
[...] good results. Shot with a Zeiss 35mm T* Distagon on a Canon Elan 7e film body. Scanned with an old LS-2000 scanner. I tried a scan with my V700 but it looked like crap and was sharp to a lousy 1.3 megapixels. [...]
[...] Frequently I have told people that from my experience the V700 is a great scanner at the price but compared to a dedicated film scanner, such as a Nikon, it’s not perfect. For almost a year I have been scanning my medium and large format film with a V700 and for about half that my 35mm film with an old Nikon LS-2000. I’ve begun shooting primarily colour negative film and I decided to show a comparison of colour negative film scans using the two scanners. This complements my previous findings that my LS-2000 outresolved the V700 when scanning 35mm b&w film. [...]