Has anyone heard anything about Nikon updating their Coolscan series of film scanners to Firewire? I would love to get one but I have an iMac DV SE and I don't want to bother with converters, etc. to get it to work. A lot of manufactures are already updating their products (ie. Linocolor 1450, Epson Expression 1600, Umax Powerlook 1100...) and I don't want to jump the gun, especially when this is a likely possibility in the near future.

Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated. I already plan on buying the Linocolor 1450 (for use on medium and large format transparencies and flat art) upon its release but I would like to have a dedicated 35mm scanner to obtain optimum quality from my 35mm archives.

[dbergstrom]

My 2 cents on why you shouldn't hold your breath:

1) I've been using a Nikon LS-2000 film scanner for a couple of years now, and it does a really nice job. I seldom use the maximum resolution when scanning (resulting files way too large), so I don't imagine they need to introduce a model with better technical specs. The only improvement they could make would be Firewire support (and continued improvement to the software).

2) I think Nikon has started focussing more on the digital camera market than on film scanners (their digital cameras are updated regularly - film scanners not so much). I will grant that digital cameras have many limitations, but their resolution is approaching that of the LS-2000. So maybe they aren't expending too much energy into a new film scanner...

3) Nikon Mac support is a little spotty. Their new product may not ship with an interface that for the time being is largely Mac-specific (Firewire) - they may stick with SCSI even on a new model.

I think Orange Micro is making a SCSI-to-Firewire adapter. I know you said you didn't want to play with adapters and such, but you could buy an LS-2000 right now for about $700 less than what I paid for it two years ago (and what a new model would cost now), use part of that extra money to buy the Firewire adapter, and the rest of the money to buy the batch slide feeder or the APS film adapter.

Getting a new G4. got the SCSI card with from the Apple store to stick all my SCSI stuff and not worry about it, including my LS 1000 scanner which rocks.

Get a cheap SCSI card for that stuff. The adapters ain’t worth the trouble.

Actually, there are rumors that Nikon will be refreshing its scanner lineup, which is getting pretty old in high-tech years.

The scuttlebutt is that Nikon will introduce a 4000 dpi scanner, with Firewire, to compete with the Polaroid Sprintscan 4000 (4000 dpi and SCSI).

Nikon is rumored to introduce the new scanners at Seybold.

Keep in mind, this is just a RUMOR.