Comments about Nikon Nikon SF-210 Auto Slide Feeder for Coolscan 5000ED Film Scanner.:

It was great buying from Adorama. The item was in stock and shipped out the next day. I am using the slide feeder on a Nikon Coolscan 4000 ED and the improved SF-210 works great.If you go on the internet to under SF-210 Slide Feeder Jams at [@] you only have to use a razorblade knife and remove at an angle a small amount of the plastic material on the top and bottom of the slide pusher. After making this modifacation, I have scanned about 500 slides so far with no jams. The slide feeder works wonderful. Another feature over the SF-200 is no more credit card modifacation needed. Nikon has added an adjustable slide feed slot. Its not cheap but if you have a lot of slides to scan it is worth the price.

Comments about Nikon Nikon SF-210 Auto Slide Feeder for Coolscan 5000ED Film Scanner.:

I've scanned over 6000 slides to date and here's what I've found:[...] There doesn't appear to be any one solution which will solve all of the problems. The bottom line is that Nikon's design just sucks. I'm amazed that they put their name on this piece of hardware. I've scanned slides ranging from B&Ws taken in the 1940s to current slides. These had all kinds of different thicknesses, compositions, etc. Believe it or not, the ones that are giving me the biggest problems are my Hama 101 plastic slide mounts that I used when I used to process my own slides. If you run into a batch of slides that are warped, be prepared to sit by the scanner and help them through if they catch on the slide behind them. You can often keep it feeding before an error message appears. A common problem that I have is that there is a V shaped spring between the outfeed stack and the ram track. When the trailing edge of the of the slide being moved into the scanner passes the right side of the V spring, the trailing edge of the slide pops slightly towards the outfeed stack, allowing the ram to slide past the slide. The slide ends up sitting on the ram track just past the gate and you get a "no slide in the scanner" error.[...] I would suggest simply breaking the edge of the ram with an emory board. What has worked VERY well is coating the leading edge of the ram with fine layer of contact cement and letting that dry. That seems to provide enough friction to keep the slide from popping towards the outfeed when it passes the V spring. You have to recoat every 500-1000 slides, but that's a quick operation and easily removable. The spring on the input feed side is much too strong and you need to add an extension to it. My extension is 53 mm long and basically provides the maximum amount of extension. The biggest problem is getting the flat head screws out of the unit so that you can access the springs. Be sure to have a very good set of precision screw drivers and make sure that you don't strip the screw heads. I stripped one of mine and had to drill it out.As suggested by another review here, if you find that the slide on the ram is catching the following slide, simply place something like a small pencil on the left hand side of the feed stack between the slides and the pusher. This will fan the slide stack and helps to keep them from catching.All in all be prepared to baby sit the scanning operation. This is not an automated process. If I'm not in my office where the scanner is located, I need to wander into the office every 15 minutes or so to check on the progress. If you have a good batch of slides, and you're lucky, you might be able to scan an entire 50-60 slides without a problem. Most likely you won't be lucky, but there really aren't any other options.

Comments about Nikon Nikon SF-210 Auto Slide Feeder for Coolscan 5000ED Film Scanner.:

Most slides now-a-days come with rounded edges and will jam this product very frequently. Nikon tech support acknowledges there is a jamming problem with rounded edges, however there is no indication they are going to do anything about it. For the price, this product should not be exhibiting this kind of problem.

Comments about Nikon Nikon SF-210 Auto Slide Feeder for Coolscan 5000ED Film Scanner.:

I've used this to scan about 20,000 images. I've learned a couple of tricks along the way. One, I still use a battery on the edge of the slide. A single triple a Battery seems to work exceptionally well. With that in place It only seems to Jam about one out of ten batches. The exception to this seems to be plastic slide mounts they are more finicky. Many of the slides I've scanned date back to the 30's and 40's I usually know which ones are going to jam it up. Basically if the inside edge of the mount is scuffed, it will likely jam. I tend to scan these at the beginning or the end of the batch. All the caveats in place this is an excellent product. I only wish I could batch 500 slides instead of 50.

Comments about Nikon Nikon SF-210 Auto Slide Feeder for Coolscan 5000ED Film Scanner.:

A much improved product over the previous version, however very typical looking slides get stuck for no reason when you are scanning large batch jobs.

Comments about Nikon Nikon SF-210 Auto Slide Feeder for Coolscan 5000ED Film Scanner.:

I've scanned hundreds (and hundreds) of slides using the SF-210. When it works it's great, but it jams easily, and when it jams you often have to cancel the scan job and begin again with the remaining slides, which is time-consuming.

You'd think that the technology to feed a slide into a projector would be pretty solid by now, but Nikon doesn't appear to have it down.

On the other hand, it's still a whole lot faster to use this feeder than to do it by hand.