MWNY: Nikon showcases new scanners

Nikon is showcasing new, high-speed desktop scanners at this week’s Macworld New York expo.

The Coolscan IV ED, Super CoolScan 4000 ED, and Super Coolscan 8000 ED are the first scanners on the market to include Applied Science Fiction’s Digital ICE technology, a suite of digital enhancement tools for color correcting and enhancing images. The scanners bridge the gap from film to digital technology, according to Deborah Sauer, general manager marketing Consumer Digital Products, Nikon.

Sauer said the Coolscan IV ED is targeted to photo enthusiasts looking to bridge the gap from film to digital imaging. The Coolscan 4000 ED and Super Coolscan 8000 ED are designed for professional photographers, service bureaus, printing houses, and archivists who need the best possible digital replication with high speed and high volume capabilities, Sauer said. The Coolscan IV ED and Super Coolscan 4000 ED are now available at suggested retail prices of US$895 and $1,695 respectively. The Super Coolscan 8000 ED is due later this summer for $2,995.

The scanners take advantage of Nikon’s Scanner Nikkor ED lens technology, which features extra-low dispersion glass for better image sharpness and color correction with minimal chromatic aberration, Sauer said. Plus, a new custom CCD complements the lens to boost overall image quality. What’s more, Nikon’s proprietary LED technology controls color and permits the CCD to run at a lower sensitivity, resulting in less noise and truer scans, she said. The LEDs — which precisely control the individual color channels of red, green and blue — enhance the capability of the Digital ICE imaging technology to harness the image’s true color, Sauer explained.

The scanners are built to offer “out of the box” plug-n-play simplicity via Nikon Scan 3.0 software, which acts as an interface between the scanner and computer. This makes it possible to preview images to be scanned, adjust scanner settings and scan the images.

Digital ICE, which works within the Nikon Scan 3.0 software, combines three color correction tools — Digital ICE, Digital ROC, and Digital GEM — that can be turned on or off to correct surface defects and enhance images, reconstruct original color, and equalize and manage grain details in film. With Digital ICE, users can restore and catalog positive and negative images that may be unusable because of fading, under or overexposure or scratches and fingerprints on film and negatives.

The Coolscan products include a full version of Altamira Genuine Fractals 2.0 software. The application can be used to scale images to larger file sizes and allows for compression of files for storage or transmission, such as e-mail or Web posting, without losing the original image quality.