Online Sales, Reviews, Deals

Full Product Name: Nikon SF-210 Auto Slide Feeder

pa

Nikon SF-210 Auto Slide Feeder Description:

The SF 210 from Nikon is an auto slide feeder that allows you to scan batches of up to 50 slides. The SF 210 accepts slide mounted 35mm film up to 1.5 millimeters in thickness and is meant to work with Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 series scanners. Converting slide film never been easier. Simply place your slide mounted film into the slide feeder and put into your Nikon Super Coolscan 5000. The SF 210 also comes backed with a one year constrained warranty.

The SF 210 from Nikon is an auto slide feeder that allows you to scan batches of up to 50 slides. The SF 210 accepts slide mounted 35mm film up to 1.5 millimeters in thickness and is meant to work with Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 series scanners. Converting slide film never been easier. Simply place your slide mounted film into the slide feeder and put into your Nikon Super Coolscan 5000. The SF 210 also comes backed with a one year constrained warranty.

Nikon SF-210 Auto Slide Feeder Reviews:

98 of 99 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars
Works, mostly,
February 2, 2005

By Mark Huth See all my reviews
REAL NAME
  

Having read the horror stories about the last slide feeder SF 200, it was with many trepidation that I bought this for the LS5000ED. I have thousands of slides to scan, and feeding them one at a time does not seem like an option.

I was happy to find that the 1st batch of Kodak cardboard mounts went through without a hitch. they were many Kodachromes from the early 70s, typically exposed. The scanner took the stack of 40 without a problem and finished the scans. but, my good luck did not really continue. About every 3rd stack manages to jam, typically just after I watch the 1st 3 slides go through without a hitch and I leave for my real job.

This slide feeder is just plain badly designed. The feed path is meant such that each slide must pass under the stack, giving the possibility of catching the edges of the window in the mount above. Additionally, for many reason, the slide gate adjustment, which changes for the thickness of the mount, wants to move a bit on it is own. failing to re adjust after stack caused a couple of jams, where the gate moved off of vertical and closed the opening too far. These problems all occurred with rather uniform stacks of slide in good to excellent condition.

I’ve had no problems with Gepe plastic mounts for slides I mounted myself, but that is typically only a small fraction of slides that people have to scan.

One solution to the jamming looks to be to use a shim to put the feed fan pressure on the outside of the slide stack. This fans the stack a bit on the inside, which allowed a balky stack to feed okay. Be cautious how you engineer this, but, as if the shim gets caught in the feed system you will have another set of problems to get the feeder back to normal.

An extra failure I have had once was for the autofocus to go totally wrong. It managed to scan an complete stack of slides badly mis focused. I put the single slide adapter in and the slides focused and scanned fine. I put the feeder back, only to find the problem persisted. I was about to pack it off to Nikon, when I power cycled the whole thing and found that correct operation had been restored.

The error handling on the batch scanning is broken, with the software thinking that scans have been finished which haven’t. This is just a nuisance, ensuing in the wrong file number part of the saved files if you do not catch it when you restart the scan. but, my software does detect that the slide did not feed, and just shuts down, requiring exiting and restarting the scanner software to resume.

And then there’s the general issue of software stability. On Windows 2000 with the SP4+ stuff, I can not use USB 2.0 scanner software looses communications with the scanner, and restarting the software leads to a blue screen of death. I have to restart the software after each roll of film approximately or the application crashes. I am going to attempt XP one of these days and see if it is any better. Hard to say if it is Nikon or MS that is screwing this up. most likely a joint effort.

Update: now running on a fast machine with XP Pro SP2, USB2.0 after solving the XP ROC GEM problem, I can report that the software is reasonably stable, typically going many number of rolls or sets of slides without crashing. there aren’t system crashes under XP, just application faults. Slide scans take around a minute to 90 seconds each in the stack feeded.

One disadvantage of the slide feeder over the film strip batch scanner is that there’s no way to do different scan settings for the slides in the stack. With film strips you may be able to tweak the settings for each frame, but there’s no preview capability in the batch scan from the slide feeder. This is an oversight that they could correct in the software. but, the feeder reverses the slide order, so you could have to restack the slides between the preview pass and the full scan pass, or the software could must be smarter than Nikon.

So I just use a default of ICE on and DEE of 30 and rescan manually any hard shots. With the 16 bit channel depth actually only 14 unless you do multisampling correction, the 5000 does 16 bit scanning with or without multisampling, the V is 14 bit most contact and shadow/highlight problems can be compensated in Photoshop afterwards.

All in all, I give Nikon a C for this effort they could do many software enhancements to increase the grade to a B with a preview option, and possibly get a real hard B if they changed the pressure plate needs to be adjustable where the pressure is placed. But the horizontal stack design will typically have jamming problems. Why they could not use a tray feed with an open acceptance path like working slide projectors is beyond me.

70 of 71 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars
Necessary but badly designed.,
October 25, 2004

By James See all my reviews

This is a great item that will enable you to batch scan 50 slides something that is needed for my business. The problem is that I am afraid to leave it unattended. It simply WILL jam. I have had many jams so far: a couple really causing the slide to get stuck in the unit requiring manual elimination and running a separate little software app to get the unit back to normal. Once it would not get back to norm and I had to send it back to Nikon. They were great but it is a nuisance… will it happen again?

The other problem I have is that when it jams, it keeps trying to scan so that your hard drive fills up with big blank white TIFFS which is just silly, why does not the software look out for this and pause the process? If it finds 5 or more files with no colour info just stop!!!

FYI all of the slides I have put through are in good shape, all the same size and with no bits of tape etc. on them. Imagine how it could jam with slides in bad shape!!

In short, the Nikon Coolscan series is a great product. Unbelievable quality at that price. And the SF 210 is a great workflow addition. But… it will jam and I think Nikon could go all the way to 100 and sort that out in the design.

54 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars
Feed problem solution,
February 2, 2006

By R. Averill See all my reviews
REAL NAME
  

I have been scanning about 3000 family slides over the past year with a Super Coolscan 5000 ED and an SF 210. For the 1st 2000 slides I frequently had trouble with slides jamming during a feed particularly if I had more than about 15 slides in the feeder. I decided that the root problem was that the feedspring pressure increased with the number of slides stacked in the feeder and that at many point this extreme pressure was the principal reason for a misfeed/jam. So…the solution was to pull the feed pusher way back to a dis engage position, take the complete scanner and tilt it about 12 degrees off horizontal, and use a C size battery and gravity to roll it down against the slides to offer a constant feed pressure. This has made a big difference! I wish I knew about this when I 1st got this feeder. Let me know if this works for you.