4000dpi,speed,ease of use,price,versitile, dust off feature
Disadvantages:
negative film carrier hard to insert sometimes, colour control, software
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
The first time I used a dedicated slide scanner was in 1996, I had seen them before as more expensive and weildy devices carted around by photo-journalists.
Ten years later the same technology is available to many at a more reasonable price. Naturally, many photographers have opted to use desktop film scanners to produce a lot of their work or produce a reliable digital image file which is easily archived.
Fortunately, I found myself in a position to buy a new scanner earlier this year and after some consideration I bought a Polaroid SprintScan 4000.
After producing a few hundred scans with this equipment I have come to know the scanner's strengths (many) and weaknesses (few).
The Sprintscan 4000 offers a lot of features for the retail price (around £890.00 incl VAT): 4000dpi optical resolution, high dynamic range (which means it can cope with over-exposed/developed film much better), cold cathode light source (like the ones used on the enlargers of the same name), speed (on a PII 333mhz processor with 256MB RAM - a 48MB scan takes around two minutes) and ease of use.
Many users prefer using alternative scanning software like Silverfast (which is bundled with the product) or Vuescan (which is not). However, the Polaroid software is reasonably good and allows a good degree of correction and control of the final scan. Colour correction is not so easy and I have had to adjust the colour balances of scans quite regularly in an image editing program afterwards. The colour manipulation interface could be better, but it still produces very high quality images after some tweaking.
One other criticism is that its not possible to scan 100% of the frame - unless of course, you personally file-down the film strip holder.
Slides tend to scan easier than negatives (which is true of many film scanners) on the Polaroid 4000. Also, like most film scanners, it does not scan heavily over-exposed or dense negs so well, although it is suprising what it does scan, given that its dynamic range (sensitivity) is lower than the Nikon and Kodak 4000dpi equivalents.
On balance, the Polaroid offers very similar quality to the other scanners mentioned above, but with a price tag of under £1000, I would reccomend the Polaroid SprintScan 4000 to serious amateur and professional photographer or businesses wanting to produce large high quality scans from any type of 35mm film.
More details
Ease of use
Easy
Design
Good
Range of extra features / functions
Good
Instruction manual
Good
Manufacturer Support
Good
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