Late last year, I bought a used CoolScan 8000ED from a member in one of the forums I belong to. It required some repair work, but after a few hundred bucks dropped on that, it worked fine.... for about 2 months, when it started acting up again. I couldn't get it off to another repair since I had to be out of the country for several months, and I finally got around to it a few weeks ago.

Then yesterday, I get a package from Nikon; the scanner came back un-repaired, due to "parts not in stock".

Which means I have a 20 pound doorstop. I did some calculations and I think I spent around $65 per roll of MF film on scanning with the 8000ED :(

So, just a cautionary tale; if you buy one of these that have been discontinued for a while, there's always a chance something like this could happen.

Quite depressed. It's more depressing because now I don't have a good choice any more. No way I'm going to drop money on an 8000ED, and no way I can afford a 9000ED. Sigh.

Wow that's pretty depressing, I'm sorry to hear about your woes! Considering the similarity between the 8000 & 9000, I'm wondering how long it will be before the 9000 suffers a similar fate!?

Well, one can be foolishly optimistic, and hope that Nikon pulled the 9000ED off the market while they still had sufficient supplies of EOL'd (end-of-life) parts to service them for quite some time. The 8000ED has been off the market for at least 7(?) years.

--Greg

PS--How is the scanner misbehaving?

PS--How is the scanner misbehaving?

Definitely one thing I'm going to do is to ask exactly which part they're talking about.

Anyway, what happens is this, often times when I turn it on, it doesn't go through the usual "booting sequence" (for the lack of a better phrase), where you hear the sounds inside while the green lamp is slowly blinking and then stops when it's ready. Instead the green lamp will continue to blink. In this case the computer doesn't even recognize the scanner.

Then if I take the power cord off and let it cool for a night and reconnect it the next morning, it'll often get back to at least being recognized by the computer. Then I'll try to use it with any one of the scanning software (NikonScan 4, VueScan, SilverFast), and then the software just won't connect to it. What usually happens is that if the scanner is on, the software will stall during the boot process. I can turn the scanner off, boot the scanning software, and then turn on the scanner, and sometimes that will work so that the scanning software will recognize the scanner. Then, I can actually start to get a preview. But then the scanner will stall during the acquisition. So after fooling around like this for an hour or more, I won't be able to get even a decent preview, let alone a scan.

Because of this erraticness in its behavior, I'm lead to believe that the issue has something to do with the "brains" of the scanner; something on the circuit board, rather than mechanical parts, scan head, etc. *sigh*

If I knew what "part" they need, perhaps I could look around for a junk 8000ED that has that part intact…. I can't afford a 9000ED and I really don't want to go back to relying on my V700 for medium format.

Well, if it were my scanner, I would probably open it up, check all the internal cables and connections, make sure the power supply components looked OK (bulging capacitors), etc. But I've been taking apart electronics and putting them back together since I was a teenager, so I'm pretty comfortable with that. It's not something I would recommend for the faint-of-heart.

Good luck finding a solution.

--Greg

There are (if I recall correctly from when I just cleaned mine) only two boards in the 8000: one logic, one power supply. I'm guessing that if it was the logic board, you'd have consistent behavior therefore it may be the power supply board, which won't have any proprietary parts on it - typically transistors, resistors & caps.
Pull the cover and take a look at the ps board (horizontal at the read, without shielding and where the switch connects) and look for anything obvious - cooked resistor etc. If this is apparent, then you should be confident in getting a scrap board from somewhere or going to some local electronic repair shop (120v in, probably 5 & 12 v dc out - not rocket science to someone in the trade)

Even if the culprit is the logic board, the most common problem, for any board, is a worn capacitor. A geek friend should be able to find an identical capacitor and solder it to the board in place of the current one. Capacitors are the weak point of any board, after batteries. For DIY maniacs it is easy to find an equivalent capacitor and do the soldering. It's the kind of "artisanal" repair that the manufacturer would not do but the mechanic down the road would do cheaper and better than the maker.