For some reason, a number of questions about Nikon film scanners have been popping into my In Box lately. And most of them end up with the "I can't get the software to work" comment.
Here's the story: Nikon Scan doesn't officially work with Leopard, and requires a special version to be installed for Vista. Nikon still advertises these products on their sites. Indeed, the tech specs for Nikon Scan on the NikonUSA site state "Mac OS X (10.1.5 or later)," which really should be "Mac OS X (10.1.5 to 10.4.x only)". The devil is in the details, and you have to drill quite far down into the Nikon site to find a note that says "10.5.x not supported."
But there also isn't a good answer about how much longer Nikon will update Nikon Scan. With Windows 7 and Mac OS 10.6 coming this fall, we have two more chances for Nikon to support their existing products, but it's unclear whether they will. Nikon has dropped software products before because of the inexorable march of OS versions. This is the fear many of us have about Capture NX2: at what point will Nikon get tired of constantly updating it? Not that I think this is imminent or that other converter options won't face the same fate one day. Still, when you see a product like Nikon Scan just stop dead in the water, you wonder about that company's other products.
So what does a Nikon scanner owner do? Well, you have two choices: Vuescan and the more expensive Silverfast. Both support all current Nikon scanners and all current OS versions (Vuescan already supports OS X 10.6 and Windows 7!), and both do a very good job of handling scans, though Silverfast better supports the advanced features of the Nikon high-end scanners.