Nikon scan compatibility with Leopard

[NigelC]

I'm looking at a new laptop this year. The Nikon website says Nikon Scan ( I have LS50) is not compatible with 10.5.2 and they do not intend to update driver! Does Vuescan, Silverfast overcome this problem? I also have a Canon 9950F but Canon seem to have updated these drivers, even though not a current scanner

[francois]

I'm looking at a new laptop this year. The Nikon website says Nikon Scan ( I have LS50) is not compatible with 10.5.2 and they do not intend to update driver! Does Vuescan, Silverfast overcome this problem? I also have a Canon 9950F but Canon seem to have updated these drivers, even though not a current scanner

Nigel,
I have a Nikon LS-4000 scanner and Nikon Scan mostly works on my G5 Mac. But I never got it to work correctly on my MacBook. I'm running Mac OS X 10.5.5. Some friends claim that Nikon Scan works perfectly on Intel-powered Macs, but I haven't seen it with my own eyes.
Anyway, VueScan works well for me but I'm only using basic settings. I'm not a heavy user. VueScan is available as a trial version so you might try to see if it works for you. Your LS50 is listed as supported (http://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/vuescan.htm#nikon).

[Jack Flesher]

I'm running my Nikon 9000 on my Mac Leopard 10.5.5. There is a Leopard driver from Nikon for my scanner, but IMO it is slow and clugy.  I downloaded trial version of both Vuescan and Silverfast and tested them. THey were both noticeably faster than Nikon Scan, and since I was familiar with the UI on SF and did not care for the UI on Vue, I immediately migrated to SF.  But at the end of the day I found that Vue generated a consistently better scan once I got the hang of the interface, and the IR dust removal was outstanding.  Given that SF was $600 and dedicated to the one scanner, and that Vue Pro was $90 and runs several scanners including my Epson flatbed, I went with Vue.  Have to say for the most part I'm really happy. Just be advised the Vue UI takes a bit to get the hang of...

Cheers,

[mikeseb]

I have run both a Nikon 8000 and 9000 on the latest version of Leopard on a late-model MacPro (intel) tower with Nikon Scan 4.02. It works fine.

One thing you might check, if you are having issues, is whether you have ANY other firewire devices attached to the computer you have the Nikon scanner attached to. EVEN IF THEY ARE TURNED OFF it could be a problem.

In my case this manifested as the Nikon Scan software repeatedly failing to detect the attached and powered-up Nikon scanner. I have several external FW hard drives attached. Turning them off didn't do the trick; only detaching them completely solved the problem. I finally decided that having to disconnect my external drives every time I use Nikon Scan is too much trouble; so I figured out a kludgy way to attach the scanner to another older machine on my network, and control the software via Leopard's screen sharing capability. Only kicker is that I have the scanned files saved to the main workstation, so over a wireless network saving 500MB scanned film files takes a moment or two.

I've tried and tried to love VueScan, but duplicating Nikon Scan's ease-of-use with film strips of multiple images has eluded me. My Epson V-750 came with SilverFast and it's good software, but almost too much for my taste. So I'll stick with NikonScan until it's no longer supported, ie, likely the next version of OSX.