Tag : slide feeder, nikon sf, 210 auto
 |  Company : Nikon List Price : $499.99 Amazon Price : $379.95 Used Price : Average customer review :  |
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Accessoies
Features
- Automatic slide mount adapter
- For use with Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 series scanners
- Accepts slide-mounted 35mm film
- Up to 50 slides for batch scanning
- 1-year limited warranty
Product Description
Nikon is a precision optical company with worldwide manufacturing, research and marketing capabilities. The Nikon name is equated with extraordinary photographic performance, innovation, precision and optical quality.Customer reviews
Works great until the metal spring loses it's shape! 
The SF-210 auto slide feeder works great until you do 3 or 4 hundred slides then the little metal spring device loses it's shape and the feeder jams. You then need to reconfigure the little metal spring that handles the slide and get the four prongs back into the right shape where it can push the slides the right way again. Very frustrating because unless you manage to get the little piece of metal back into it's original shape it keeps jaming slides and shutting down.
CoolScan SF-210 
I have had very good luck scanning about 500 slides, with no jamming problems. it sure makes scanning slides easy. I am using a PowerPC with Mac OS X 10.4.11.
Okay, but could be better
After reading some of the other reviews, it is with some fear that I bought the slide feeder.
Unless you have a very small project, this item is a must have. I am in the middle of a 5000+ slide project. Hand feeding them isn't an option.
The scanner worked well initially, handling 400 odd 1980's vintage Kodak processed slides without a hitch. Older slides (Kodak processed from the 1960s and 1970's) resulted in about 1 jam in 100 slides. Slides in poor condition resulted in more jams, particularly dog eraed corners and warped slides. I had a roll that wouldn't feed well. When I went to hand feeding with the single slide loader, I was reminded how much better the auto feeder was and gave up on hand feeding and went back to the feeder with some babysitting.
Another disappointment is that it is not compatible with the less expensive coolscan V, requiring the more expensive Coolscan 5000.
I have also found that it feeds better running vertically.
Great scanner after a bit of fiddling 
After reading several reviews I was skeptical about this product because of the reports of frequent jamming, but it is the only system available for digitizing a gozillion slides. I found several fixes and used a paper clip to extend the origin of the slide feed compression spring. It was an easy fix after unscrewing a few (7 to be exact) screws. Here's the link for the fix I used:
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1007&message=16118672
Here's a link for another type of fix:
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1007&message=15300370
After that fix it worked well. HOWEVER there is a slide depth adjustment that needs to be paid attention to. Each of my carousels of slides had slightly different widths (I'm talking about fractions of millimeters) so I had to pay attention to the depth adjustment to not pull 2 slides at once. Also you need to be careful about orienting the slides horizontally.
Having said that and after a brief modification as well as a bit of a steep but brief learning curve, the slide feeder and the LC5000 scanner work well together. I have not as yet scanned a 50 slide batch, but so far a batch of 25 has worked well.
It is a pain in the butt that one has to modify a $450 product to get it to work right, but when it works, it is an immense time saver.
I do like the Nikon Scan 4.0.2 software that came with the scanner. There are a good number of image format options from which to choose. I do additional post work in Photoshop after the software digitizes the images.
It sort of works
This thing is buggy, but 's better than the alternative of hand feeding a large number of slides.
Don' buy if you think you are going to put in 50 slides, flip it on and walk away. it will stop on about every 10th slide, jam up, and youll have to go through a process of extracting the slide, and restarting the software.
Reaally ashame that Nikon hasn't figure out to manufacture something that is more failsafe. I can think of lots of simple improvements that would make it work better.
