Now I’m ready. I just won a 35mm Nikon transparency scanner on ebay. This Coolscan LS-30 originally sold for $750 to $900 from 1999-2002. I paid a whopping $57.96 plus shipping. I may even dedicate an old PC to it. I happen to have a 19″ Viewsonic monitor that’s not being used. I could build a retro, late 90’s digital image processing station.
This unit’s got modern power though. It scans at up to 2700 dpi (25MB file) from a 35mm negative and uses Nikon Coolscan software – the best in the business. It doesn’t have high end things like multi-sample averaging and can’t output files with more than 8 bits per channel. To get features like those you’ve gotta spend some bucks. This is an old-school pro-tool that has fallen into my price range by technological attrition.