Nikon SF-210 Auto Slide Feeder

Nikon SF210 Auto Slide Feeder has saved my day. I have about 4000 slides to scan and have about half of them done. It is very expensive but has really helped me. So weigh it out - how precious are your old slides and memories - priceless!!!

I got charged the restocking fee after Amazon's false adverstisement(Nikon Cools Scan V ED + Nikon SF-210 in a bundle, although V EDdoes not support the feeder). But after filing a claim at Amazon, I got all my money back. So no bad feelings towards Amazon. I kept the slide feeder and ordered a Nikon cool scan 5000 ED, because manual slide by slide scanning is not really an option...Now about $1500 later I find out that all the bad reviews about the SF-210 were no exaggeration. This thing is a complete failure! With regular Hama DSR frames I get an error message about every 5 slides. Nikon should be deeply ashamed to throw such a piece of poorly engineered equipment on the market.

The Nikon SF-210 Auto Slide Feeder could be a great product if the engineers would address a few possible design flaws. First is the spring pressure of the pressure plate which appears to generate excessive surface tension with the adjacent slide and possibly compresses the slides below the minimum thickness tolerance of the feeder ram. This can cause dual slide feeds and resultant jams. Second is a ridge on the slide track that tends to grab a feeding slide, also causing jams. The spring tension can be changed by adding a paper clip (ideally one should use a strain gauge to measure the actual pressures and replace the spring with one of less tension). The ridge can be camfered or radiused to eliminate the grab. After doing the above, it has worked fine without a jam in over a 1000 slides. That said, one should not have to pay $400+ for a Nikon product that provides sub optimum performance without user modifications. I am trying to contact Nikon to see if they too believe the above to be a problem and if they will provide a retrofit kit with better components. When it works, it works great and the ICE software does a remarkable job.

Through no fault of the SF-210, some slides (mostly thinner cardboard type)will catch on each other's film window as they slide past each other. It worked better on the plastic sleeve slides. I seldom had a group of 50 slides that went entirely through without a jam and I did about 2000 scans. I believe the SF-210 could have been designed to prevent the slides from catching on each other but it would be a more expensive piece of equipment if that were the case. The software requires you to restart it if a jam occurs, (that was frustrating). There are definitely improvements needed on the software. Having said all this, I don't think there is a better product on the market for the average home user, and overall I'm pleased with the scan quality of the slides. The experience I had with this product was good, but not great.

After reading several reviews I was skeptical about this product because of the reports of frequent jamming, but it is the only system available for digitizing a gozillion slides. I found several fixes and used a paper clip to extend the origin of the slide feed compression spring. It was an easy fix after unscrewing a few (7 to be exact) screws. Here's the link for the fix I used:[...]Here's a link for another type of fix:[...]After that fix it worked well. HOWEVER there is a slide depth adjustment that needs to be paid attention to. Each of my carousels of slides had slightly different widths (I'm talking about fractions of millimeters) so I had to pay attention to the depth adjustment to not pull 2 slides at once. Also you need to be careful about orienting the slides horizontally.Having said that and after a brief modification as well as a bit of a steep but brief learning curve, the slide feeder and the LC5000 scanner work well together. I have not as yet scanned a 50 slide batch, but so far a batch of 25 has worked well.It is a pain in the butt that one has to modify a $450 product to get it to work right, but when it works, it is an immense time saver.I do like the Nikon Scan 4.0.2 software that came with the scanner. There are a good number of image format options from which to choose. I do additional post work in Photoshop after the software digitizes the images.

If you can get one, you are lucky. Others have had some issues but I am not one of them. Mine came w/European warranty but it was never used during the time period. Flawless performance on a thousand slides so far.

Great communication, product as described, thanks

If you are still reading these reviews and have not figured it out yet...........this auto feeder is JUNK.If you have some fantasy about loading a stack of slides, hitting a button and walking away expecting to come back an hour later and reload the machine...........you are in for a RUDE awakening.Before you buy this, ask yourself several questions:1. Do you like rebooting your computer(even if it is a dedicated scanning computer with Win 2000 & Nikon's software and nothing else)?2. Do you have the time to clear jams every third slide?3. Do you have the time to reset your image number in the software after every jam/computer reboot/scanner reboot sequence?4. Do you have time to go through your scanned image files to find the images of a white screen, because Nikon was too cheap to put a switch in the scanner to tell the scanner there is no slide in the scanning position(thus scanning a slide that is not there)?The Coolscan 5000ED is not much better. Hope you like you slides with a blue tint added to every image!12 years and $15,000 invested in Nikon stuff.I am officially done with Nikon.