Equipment
Camera
I still have my Nikon F90 film SLR. It is a pitty that I havn’t used it for long time. I guess it simply has something to do with time mainly. I used the camera very much, especially during holidays when I was travelling.
The Nikon F90 was produced from 1992 to 2001. At that days it was a semi-professional autofocus SLR camera for 35mm films and succeeded the Nikon F-801.
Technical details and key features
Auto focus areas: 1 (1 cross sensor)
Auto focus modes: single servo and continuous servo
Exposure programs:
aperture priority (A), shutter priority (S), automatic program (P), manual mode (M)
Motif programs:
landscape, silhouettes, portrait, close-up, maximum depth of field
Exposure times: 1/8000 to 30 seconds
Viewfinder: 92% with 0.78x magnification
Continuous shooting: up to 3.6 frames per second
Exposure metering:
3D color matrix metering, center-weighted metering, spot metering
Balanced Fill-Flash and
FP High-Speed Sync
As I already had some different lenses I’d made my decission to stick to Nikon also in digital times using F-mount lenses.
digitize
British columbia 2005
The Plustek film scanner is dedicated like others to the proposition that even if film cameras are all but almost dead, there’s still plenty of film lying around that needs to be digitized. That actually was the reason I bought it in some years ago bearing in mind having still more that 50 boxes with 200 35mm slides each. Unfortunately I still not have had the time to start that time consuming task.
Unlike high-resolution flatbed photo scanners the 7600i SE can’t scan anything but film, meaning slides or strips of film. But I must admit that the 7600i SE is not meant for casual photographers who are looking for an easy, fast way to scan. If that’s what you’re looking for, you’ll probably find both the scan software and the scanning process too demanding. To start the scan, you first need to mount one to four slides or a strip of film in a carrier and then slide the carrier into a slot on the scanner’s side. When you position the carrier, you can feel it click into place, which makes it easy to line up the film or slide correctly, but it’s a completely manual procedure. You scan only one slide or frame at time and then have to move the carrier to the next one. Unfortunately the software is similarly lacking in automatic features, which means you can’t simply give a scan command and expect the utility to change settings to give you an appropriate scan. You have to manually set it for negative or positive film, for the resolution you want, and so on.
Just to mention some time experience with the scanner. It consistently pre-scanned a single slide or frame of film in 14 seconds. Simple scans, without “iSRD” (= Infrared Dust and Scratch Removal) or other features that would add time, took 32 seconds at 200 ppi, 54 seconds at 300 ppi, and 3 minutes 2 seconds at the maximum of 7,200 ppi. However, the speed can change dramatically if you take advantage of some of the more sophisticated features. Adding iSRD to a 200 ppi scan, for example, more than doubled the time, from 54 seconds to 2:13 minutes.
So for my usage the Plustek 7600i SE still offers an attractive balance between scan capability and price. Someday I may find the patience to start this process
or I may change later to the Nikon film digitising adapter ES-2 which enables the direct digital copying or scanning of processed 35mm format positive/negative films using it in front of a suitable lens.
Alex' Fotoecke 