Wow, it is amazing how fast digital technology advances. You don’t notice it moving forward but if you ever need to go back a step it becomes pretty glaring.

Our Architecture library is acquiring the archive of an architect here in NYC and as part of the acquisition deal, the University has promised to digitize about 2,500 35mm slides. Sending it out to a lab for scanning would be too expensive (about $6.00 per scan). So I decided to dust off our old Nikon scanners, an LS 9000 and LS 5000. The 9000 model we have used on occasion for medium format film scans and so we have maintained it and upgraded the software.

Not so for the LS5000. In order to get the machine running I had to find an old Mac running OS 10.6 or earlier. Good things I have friends in IT. The old software disc would not play on the Mac but after some trial and error I was able to copy the contents of the disk onto a USB key and install on the Mac. The Nikon scan software was hard to find and downloaded as an .sit file. I had to find and download and install Stuffit expander. then calibration and testing.

I have not used film in over a decade but I still had a plastic bin stuffed with slide boxes from Duggal underneath my worktable at my office. I picked a box at random and picked a slide to scan as a test. The above image is the result after a little color correcting and cropping in Photoshop CS5 (this is ancient software in digital years!).

All in all not bad for an old technology.