Yesterday’s Tech: the Nikon LS-4000 Slide Scanner
What's a "slide?"
We know, we know: film is dead. However, just because everyone has left film behind doesn’t mean that there aren’t mountains of film worth preserving.
We ourselves have at least 20 years of 35mm negatives and color slides, carefully cataloged, and safely stored. It’s unlikely that we’ll make prints from them any time soon, but it would be great to have digital copies of them to “enjoy” them at our leisure.
What we’ve got (nananana-NA-na)
Old school film photographers who have gone digital may appreciate this recent acquisition: a Nikon LS-4000 negative/slide scanner!
One of us had one when we worked at Kodak back in the day (since Kodak went out of business in 2012, we are talking WAAAAAAAY back in the day). Back then, the Nikon LS-4000 retailed for around $1,500. Today, you can buy one for around $50. Sure, a Mac with a FireWire port is needed to run it, but who doesn’t have one of those laying around? (Rest of the RainyDay office: crickets…)
The scanner’s condition was a little rough, but we wanted to try to get it up and running. After all, we didn’t really have any other plans today (football notwithstanding).
This is a what, now?
The bundle came with the following:
- Nikon LS-4000 scanner;
- Film negative tray;
- 35mm slide tray; and
- Original instruction manual.
Wait, is this like a grownup version of the Play Doh shape maker thing?
Awesomely (that’s a word if we say it is), Nikon still had the Mac driver on its site for this 20-year old device, but, alas, it was compressed in a proprietary format (.sit) that even the format’s creator, StuffIt, doesn’t support any more.
We were pretty sure we had a copy of StuffIt somewhere on our server (because we’re like that) from the old days, but seriously, Nikon Corporation…compress drivers in a self-extracting way just in case someone needs it 20 years later.
It would be super cool if we could open the drivers…
Hooking it up
Connecting the 20-year old Nikon scanner to a modern Mac proved to be more challenging than we expected it to be.
A Firewire-to-USB-C cable was not something we have in-house (weird, we know; our bad), nor is it readily available at our local Micro Center. However, we did have a good collection of USB-Firewire cables for older Macs, and figured that it was possible that one of them might be able to do the job.
Athos, Porthos, Artemis,…and Curly
After a bit of “try this one; no, try that on”-ing we finally found a combination which could plug into the back of the old Mac Mini and the Nikon scanner…YAY!!!
Hey, at least the scanner didn’t require a SCSI port and terminators (note to whippersnappers: that’s a good thing).
Look. At. The. Red. Arrow. Ignore the rest. We don’t like to talk about the rest (SkyNet is not dead, that’s all we’re gonna say).
Repairs
The scanner came with the faceplate broken into two sections. Two-part epoxy made it whole again.
Do not mistake this for a tri-corder. You cannot make a tri-corder from the Nikon film/slide scanner faceplate. Take our word for it.
We had to glue the piece in such a way that the black cover could no longer slide to cover the opening when not in use. We thought it was a decent compromise, as it did the trick.
Scanner? Single espresso maker? Personal nuclear device? One does wonder…
Getting it to run
With everything connected repaired and connect, we held our breath as we pushed the Power button: the “green” light lit up!!!
We needed to get the Mac Mini “talking” to the Nikon scanner in some fashion. Next step: decompress the driver and install it.
While trying unsuccessfully to decompress the OEM driver, we came across a piece of software from Ed Hamrick called VueScan. This amazing piece of software can drive a huge number of scanners (over 7100 different kinds), including the Nikon LS-4000!!!
“I wish I had someone something to talk to…”
Backstory: In 1989 one of the editors made a slide as a proof of concept that desktop digital photography was possible on a Mac. The slide was a merge of a Mandelbrot fractal and a sunset…output to a photographic slide! In 1989, that was a big deal/break through.
In 1989 the only way to create such an analog-digital composite was with a Sun minicomputer running high-end prepress software. There were no such things as high-res color desktop printers, or 24-bit monitors, or image manipulation software on the Mac.
Anyway, we found that slide and decided that it would be the first thing scanned with our new-to-us/Frankenstein-y slide scanner.
Digital photography has come a LONG way, baby!
Oh…it’s an Easy-Bake Oven, for slides…right?
Both the Nikon scanner and the VueScan software were intuitive and simple to use:
- Launch the VueScan software;
- Select the Nikon scanner as the source;
- Insert the slide into the scanner;
- Select “scan.”
The scanning was fast and the image came out great!
An old software result being shown on new technology. All are welcome here…
We’ll play with the setup and try the bulk slide tray and the negative sleeve to see how this piece of “Yesterday’s Tech” has held up over time. So far, it is doing amazingly well!!!
Links to items mentioned:
It is great that you found the LS-4000 for $50. You are lucky if you can score one for less than $500 in this day and age. Despite their age, this scanner and other Nikon scanners from that time, are sought after because they are still some of the best film and slide scanners out there. There is real Nikon glass on the inside. They are very high quality units.