This post documents my attempt to get an old Nikon film scanner running in Windows 10.
I purchased this film scanner around 2000 when I was still doing a lot of 35mm film. I wasn’t convinced I wanted what was, then, a fairly low resolution digital camera when film had far more resolution (try blowing up a 5 megapixel image to post-size). To me, it made a lot more sense to digitize film.
Eventually digital cameras won the battle and I switched. I haven’t shot a roll of 35mm since 2005. Though I won’t give up my medium format camera yet!
I maintained the film scanner for many years after Windows XP was no longer supported as that was the last Operating System that had drivers for the Nikon scanner. Finally, I wasn’t using the scanner and maintaining XP was becoming a real security risk, so I boxed up the scanner.
I’ve used Hamrick’s VueScan software to scan film since as far back as I can remember. Not only for 35mm, but for slides and medium format as well with my Epson scanner. Recently, it came to my attention that Hamrick reverse engineered Nikon’s driver and my Nikon Scanner could be unboxed again.
FireWire for Windows 10
The first problem to resolve was getting FireWire (a.k.a. IEEE 1394) operational on my PC. FireWire was kind of Apple’s version of USB. It is the same interface that many portable digital video cassette recorders used. Connecting the DVCR to your PC with FireWire, allowed you to rip DV tapes to your computer.
PC’s (for the most part) never had an integrated FireWire port, you bought a PC card for that functionality.
My first task was to locate my old FireWire interface card that had been in my old XP system that had been connected to the scanner even though I was sure it was an old PCI card. Ugh, sure enough it was. It would not fit into my modern system with its PCI express slots.
I started off by purchasing a USB to IEEE 1394 converter dongle. I couldn’t see how this could possibly work but it was cheap and I tried to be optimistic. NOPE, it didn’t work. Rats!
I was going to need a PCI Express IEEE interface card. After scouring the various cards on Amazon I selected this one (click to go to Amazon):
The instructions are very poorly written, but the IEEE 1394 interface card does work.
- Install the card into a PCIe slot.
- Insert the mini-CD into your CD player and open it.
- Go to the folder: E:\PCI Express Serial\Legacy:
- Most likely you will want to double-click the 64bit Installer.
- This installer ran quickly and gave me no indication of success. But I did find the driver installed at C:\Program Files (x86)\1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller (Legacy)\x64_driver:
- At this point, I opened Device Manager and looked for something saying IEEE 1394. There was nothing that looked even close to what I might be looking for.
- Per the instructions, I moved the card to another PCIe slot and restarted.
- This time, the card showed up in device manager:
- I turned on the Scanner. Device Manager saw the scanner but didn’t have a driver (or at least I assume that is the meaning of the yellow ! mark):
Installing VueScan
Once the scanner was physically connected, the next step was to install VueScan.
VueScan is not free software. You can download and try it for free, but any picture you save will have a big watermark on it, making it worthless. So you will have to pony up the roughly $100 for the Pro version (necessary for film scanning). On the plus side, once you pay for it updates are for life. And I’ve been getting them for over 20 years now.
I installed the scanner onto a test computer system rather than a production system, just in case. Since this is on a test system, I decided to just download a trial version of VueScan to make sure it can actually see the scanner.
The download site is here: https://www.hamrick.com/download.html
Once installed and started, VueScan sees the film scanner without a glitch:
and in device manager, other devices is now Imaging Devices and a FireWire scanner is attached:
Using VueScan
This isn’t going to be a tutorial on VueScan, but I want to make sure the scanner works, including the ability to scan an entire roll/strip.
To scan a cut strip of film:
- Insert film strip with frame numbers face up, lowest frame # goes into scanner first. The scanner will grab the strip and load it.
- Now in VueScan Source is LS-4000, the film scanner.
- Media, for this test, is Color Negative
- Change Batch Scan to List.
- In Batch List use 2-* to scan frames 2-5 (frame 1 is the leader):
- Press Preview button and all 4 frames will be scanned at reduced resolution so you can preview them before performing the actual scan.
- Once the preview is done, all of the frames are listed to the far right.
- Go thru each frame, making any necessary changes. All of my test frames needed to be rotated.
- Now Press the Scan button to scan all frames.
Some other usage notes:
- Make sure scanner is off when changing film adapters; otherwise, VueScan will report No Scanner.
And here is nearly the the last image I ever shot in 35mm way back in 2005:
Big Dan the Blogging Man 
Wow! Thank you so much for writing this up. You are a resourceful guy. I’ve seen some inspiring examples from the Coolscan 9000, which of course is very expensive. This looks pretty good too. At least it does on the internet. I’m not seeing hints, of the little white specs from prior dust that are somewhat common in these. I’m assuming the Vuescan plays a big role in clean up and providing processed files. Is that correct? Good on Hamrick by the way for updating the drivers. Sometimes I’ll see old 4000’s around. Is this a single box-shaped unit, similar to the picture you showed or are several pieces required for an intact system?
Thanks again for posting this!
The scanner makes an infrared (as I recall) pass as I recall to detect dust. VueScan can make use of that. However, the final responsibility is on the user. I would handle film only with thin cotton gloves and have anti-static cleaning cloth I would use before scanning the strip. I would also *carefully* blow single bits of dust off using compressed air. Lots of emphasis on carefully! I guess what I did worked as I don’t recall really ever having issues with dust.
The 4000ED is what I had. I ended up selling it this summer. I scanned all of my film years ago and it just sat. On the rare occasion I scan film (which is always 120 film these days), I have an Epson flat bed scanner that will do the job. And VueScan works well with it too. But back when I would scan a full 36 exposure roll with it, it was AWESOME!