Problems with Coolscan V on Windows 7

[timbo59]

I bought my Coolscan V (LS-50) about 10 years ago and used it to work through a lot of my negatives. Then I upgraded my PC a few years later and with it the OS to Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate, which I've clung on to because I hated the look of 8. At any rate, as some of you might know, Nikon's scanners (or should I say their software) won't function on anything after XP so I set the hardware aside until I could eventually figure out a solution. I recently wanted to start digitizing and archiving more of my old work and found that a solution had actually been found in the interim, which was to use Nikon Scan 4.03 for Vista (contrary to Nikon's literature the software will apparently function in a Win 7 environment) with a couple of alternative drivers in place. According to all the posts I read the solution has worked for just about everyone else, but I seem to be having issues. The program pops up, works with the scanner, etc, but all that happens after inserting either slides or negatives is that the scanner will work away for a few minutes, going through each individual frame, finish up - and show absolutely nothing, as if it had never initiated in the first place. I have played around with it, tried everything, but nothing seems to work. Yet when I downloaded a trial version of Silverfast everything worked just fine. Under the circumstances I may be forced to buy SF just to keep on working (and it is an excellent program, even in it's most basic form) but I'd be interested to know if anyone else has encountered this issue with Nikon Scan and Win 7?

 

[MarkF48]

I've been using VueScan from VueScan Scanner Software for Windows Mac OS X and Linux with Vista and an LS-50 with no problems. I do have a Win7 64bit machine that I have not tried it with yet, but since you've brought up this issue I probably should. I think you can download VueScan to try and it puts a watermark on the scan until you register. I've contacted Hamrick with questions and gotten answers fairly quickly.

 

[timbo59]

Hi Mark,
It's not so much a case of finding a third party program to make it work (like Vuescan or Silverfast) because I know they do. There's some aspects to Nikon's program that I like for quick processing of just humdrum stuff I'm archiving for family purposes, and it isn't too bad in some other respects as well. So if possible I'd simply like to get it up and running again, and I thought I had found the solution - just can't figure why it seems to have worked for others while I'm having issues.

For interest, here's the solution I found elsewhere - Axel Rietschin Nikon LS-40 LS-50 LS-5000 Scanners on Windows 8.1 Windows 8 Windows 7 and Windows Vista 64-bit

 

[dxqcanada]

One note on the web is to use the driver from VueScan.
Uninstall the Nikon scanner driver and install VueScan ... and let the Coolscan software use that instead.

 

[timbo59]

Yeah I remember reading that as well but figured that either approach would work. But thanks for the reminder, I'll give it a try - certainly can't hurt at this stage!

 

[imagemaker46]

I had nothing but problems using my Nikon scanner when I had to switch windows systems. I went through a couple of Nikon scanners before getting a Plustek, not the same cost(much cheaper) but did the same job and I've never had any trouble changing systems, including a switch from PC to MAC.