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But since I haven't really had any horrible problems, I give it 5 stars. I scanned box after box of slides without issue, and I have now scanned over 3,000 slides. Even if I had experienced any significant problems, there really aren't any viable alternatives out there. After reading all the reviews, I was prepared for aggravation. Happy scanning. I have experienced some jamming, particularly with older cardboard mounts and groups of mixed format mounts, but on the whole, the performance has been stellar. I figured it would jam and jam and then jam some more. I did no modifications at all.
As modified it is satisfactory I have given this product 4 stars based on a simple and reversable modification to the feeder mechanism. If unmodified the product would likely rate two stars or less due to its tendency to jam when feeding slides.
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 software requires you to restart it if a jam occurs, (that was frustrating). There are definitely improvements needed on the software. 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. The experience I had with this product was good, but not great. I seldom had a group of 50 slides that went entirely through without a jam and I did about 2000 scans. It worked better on the plastic sleeve slides. 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.
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. That said, one should not have to pay $400+ for a Nikon product that provides sub optimum performance without user modifications. After doing the above, it has worked fine without a jam in over a 1000 slides.
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. 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 Nikon SF-210 Auto Slide Feeder could be a great product if the engineers would address a few possible design flaws.
The ridge can be camfered or radiused to eliminate the grab. When it works, it works great and the ICE software does a remarkable job. 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.
I'm often able do 50 or so (about the max which fits in the feeder tray) without a single jam. Having read about all sorts of alterations (from switching springs to shaving off bits of plastic) that are required to get the SF-210 to function properly, I was expecting only headaches from it. Bottom line---if you are tackling the job of archiving all the old family photos, this is a must have and it works much better than many of the reviews would lead you to believe. On older slides (dating to the 50s and 60s), I do have some jamming problems but they are still the exception rather than the rule. Happily though, I've been through more than 1200 slides of the family archive so far (about 3600 to go) while it is true that the slide feeder does occasionally jam, I have found that it is very much a function of the age of the slides. Slides less than 20-25 years old scan without a problem.
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