Polaroid Sprintscan 4000 Review

Everything here is totally unbiased, I have no connection to any vendor associated with this hardware or software, so I can and will in some cases be very brutal.

The specs

Now rather than bore you, and just repeat the published specs, I am just going to give a brief overview. So, the Sprintscan 4000 has a true optical resolution of 4000 x 4000 dpi, scans with a single pass RGB CCD device, with a dynamic range of 3.4, Polaroid states that the color depth is 36bit with 12bit A/D conversion per channel (more on this later) and uses a SCSI interface. For the full Polaroid specs follow this link

Loading media

There are three types of media adapters available, these being, 35mm mounted slides, 35mm strip film or unmounted slides and APS. Polaroid supplied the first two with the scanner, the APS being optional. I only use 35mm so will not be covering the APS adapter. To insert either of the supplied adapters into the scanner is not what I would call nice, put simply you push them in until you feel the pickup motor engage, with this method its possible to push too hard which results is some nasty grinding noises, and to me could actually damage the adapter pickup.

35mm mounted slides

The adapter for mounted sides will take up to 4, each is clipped into place with a little plastic spring, this while it does sound like a good thing, its actually been the only problem I have ever had with this scanner. After about 6 months of heavy use, several of these little plastic springs started to crack near the base, not a good thing with a AUD$2000+ scanner. Anyway my dealer replaced the holder with what to me looks like a slightly different design. Now almost 2 years later that problem has not happened again. This adapter while fully functional, and while a great improvement over the older Sprintscan which only accepted a single slide, is not as good as the magazine loader I would have liked to see as standard.

Strip film or unmounted slides

If you like this adapter do not read this bit, as I hate this thing. Anyway for those who have not experienced it, it allows for a strip of 6 shots to be mounted for scanning (no surprise there). To mount the strips, you need to open the adapter which was my first problem, the documentation at the time was totally useless, you are presented with what looks like a solid piece of plastic with a small diagram of it open. It took me a little while to figure it out, that there is a small catch on the bottom that when pressed bends the top of the adapter up, and if pressed real hard will open the thing. OK its now open, I was expecting two rows of teeth to match up with the sprocket holes on the film, but no, what there is are several small plastic stops, and a small 3 tooth slider. This slider was actually a surprise, as it will at least allow for some adjustments in position for the strip, I suppose this is why they did not use rows of teeth. Anyway I have not used this slider more than a few times since getting this scanner, others may use it all the time, up to you. I would have liked some sort of mechanical toothed arrangement to wine strips into the scanner.

Software

I am not a Windoze user, so cannot comment first hand on the supplied software, all I can say on this is that others I spoke to, tell me that the original "insite" software was "all right" and the replacement for this, is much better. Now back to a real OS which is not supported by Polaroid, but all is not lost, under Linux you use, Ed Hamricks Vuescan which I have been using for several years now. In the early days the results from this where good, but the user interface was crude, all this changed with the newer versions, things are in a different league, the scan results are stunning (See the examples for more on that one) and the user interface is getting better with every release. While on the subject of releases Ed supplies Vuescan on a pay once, upgrade for ever at no change, which is the way things should be. In short if you are a Linux user pay the US$40 for Vuescan you will not regret it.

Scan Quality Examples

All the photos on this page have been scanned under Linux using the latest Vuescan version 7.5.22. Now before getting on with the examples there are a few things that you need to understand. They are not scientific, they are intended only to illustrate the differences I have found when scanning different slide films. Each example consists of 3 shots, the first being a full frame thats been scaled to fit on this page, the second a 100% crop of a foreground object, the third a 200% (or more) zoom of a small part of the original shot. For all of them there has been no editing other than cropping and adding the borders. That said, its down to the examples.

For this first example I gave the scanner and software a bit of a challenge, this shot was taken with Fuji Provia 100F, hand held from the deck of a small boat in the early afternoon right in the middle of a Sydney Summer, in all, the relatively fast film, no stable platform and harsh lighting made for a shot with hard shadow and high contrast.

For the photographers out there, this shot of some yacht's moored on Sydney harbor back in the Summer 1999, was taken with my Nikon F100, using the Nikon 80-200 f2.8 lens at around 80, using Fuji Provia 100F film, with an aperture of f11, spot metered of the white deck of the foreground boat, hand held from the deck of a friends small boat.

To scan this slide, I used all the default settings on Vuescan, the only change made was to crop the right hand side by about 5mm. The original scan file was 95MB uncompressed tiff file which I pulled into gimp, added the border, cleaned up a scratch in the top left corner and scaled it. Other than that this shot is as is. Good yes? well to see how much detail there is in this scan, I cropped a small area of the full size image (using gimp) of the deck of the yacht in the foreground, which is shown below.

Note the detail on the hatches, and the bottom of the mast, even in the harsh lighting and slight over exposure on the white deck. While this is good, to really see how good it can get, this next example zoomed using gimp, shows a navy warship at the base on the far side of the harbor over a kilometer away.

Hows that for impressive! This is as far as you can go without seeing excessive film grain, and even more scanner artifacts. To get better than this the next example I used a slower film (Velvia at 40), tripod mounted.

Example 2. Fuji Velvia Slide Film

For this example as I mentioned above was shot with a much slower film, had the camera tripod mounted and was much closer to the subject. It was also taken at the wrong time of day, as to give a better indication of the difference this slower film makes.

Again for the photographers out there, this shot taken in Sydney's Botanical Gardens, also back in Summer of 1999, was taken with my Nikon F100, using the Nikon 28-80 f2.8 lens, using Fuji Velvia rated at 40, with an aperture of f11, matrix metered, tripod mounted.

This slide was also scanned with the default settings under Vuescan, the only editing done was to crop and add the border, other than that its as is. Now, the next shows how much more detail the Sprintscan captures at 100%, just like the last example.

Not bad? its a little soft, but even without sharpening, just look at the detail on the rocks and dirt. Also notice the complete absence of film grain or any sign of scanner artifacts. Now with this last shot I used about 50% more zoom than the last example, and still nothing other than the border has been done in the way of editing.

Not bad? its a little soft, but even without sharpening, just look at the detail on the rocks and dirt. Also notice the complete absence of film grain or any sign of scanner artifacts. Now with this last shot I used about 50% more zoom than the last example, and still nothing other than the border has been done in the way of editing.

Hows that, for detail? this is as far as I could take this shot without seeing excessive scanner artifacts, and at this point its even softer, so I played around a little with this image and indeed some very slight sharpening does do wonders (no this is not the edited version!). One thing to note, is there is no sign of film grain, which is not exactly unexpected with this film. In the next example shows a negative scan that been processed by a 1 hour quick lab.

Yes another Velvia example, this time using a newer version of vuescan this time running under OSX 10.3.4. While I would not normally have added a second example for any film, the color saturation produced by this scanner in combination with the new software is so impressive that its earned its place here.

This shot was taken with my Nikon F100 with 28-70AFS lens, using Velvia (no surprise right!) shot and processed at 40. Other than adding the border, this image is straight out of Vuescan, being scanned using the default settings.

Not much to be said, simply stunning, especially when you understand that this has come from a scanner thats several years old, plus several generations behind the newer models.

As I said above this example is a scan of a negative that was processed by one of those 1 hour shopping center labs, its intended to show that even with these you can get some acceptable results. This shot was taken with my old Pentax Z1 system, hand held using Fuji 100 print film.

Again for the photographers out there, this shot was taken with my Pentax Z1 hand held, using a Pentax 28mm lens at f11, using Fuji 100 print film, on a beach in Singapore and processed by a 1 hour shopping center lab.

While this scan is not bad, its not as good as the previous examples, the contrast is not as high, but is still usable. Now as with the other examples, I cropped an area of this shot at 100%, and scaled it to fit on this page.

Yes its still usable, if having lower contrast that I would like. I did a little playing around with this image, and yes this does help, but not by much. Anyway for this next image I chose another bench further in the background, and used the same zoom as used for the third shot in the first example.

This is actually better than I expected from print film. What I expected, was to show much more film grain that it did, and also more problems related to the processing, such as the small white spots on the tree on the left side.

So far I have shown examples of relatively slow films, so now with this final example I used Fuji MS100/1000 slide film at its optimal of 400. As with all the other examples, none of these shots have been edited in any way other than adding the border. Anyway below is the full frame.

For the photographers out there this shot was taken in the middle of last winter late in the afternoon, hand held with my Nikon F100 with Nikon 28-70 AFS lens at f11, using a circular polarizer filter (no surprise, just look at the sky).

This was scanned with all the default settings under Vuescan. The color is good, but whats not so good is its too soft for my liking, and does need editing. Now moving on this next shot is a 100% crop of the full frame, again its not edited other than the border.

While this is good, its not as good as the other examples, which is to be expected with film this fast. You can see the film grain is very noticeable, but there is no sign of any scanner artifacts. Moving onto the last shot which is the same image at 200%.

This is actually better than I would have expected with 400 film, sure its soft, grainy, and you can see some scanner artifacts but its surprising, and with editing usable.

Closing Words

As you can see from the above rather un-scientific examples, the Sprintscan 4000 can produce good to excellent results with little additional editing, even with my choice of less than ideal shots (harsh light, bad processing etc) for the examples. From the beginning I set out to make life difficult, so to try and give a better idea of what this expensive scanner is capable of, and was not disappointed. In short I strongly recommend both this scanner and also Vuescan for Linux as the ideal combination for scanning slides and negatives.

Highly Recommended.

Film Tips: Here are a few tips to do with the Fuji slide films I use regularly, that should help you get the best results when scanning slides.

• Fuji Velvia. Shoot and Process at 40 not 50, this I found results in a better scan.
• Fuji Provia 100F. Just like with Velvia I found that this scans better when not shot/processed at its rated 100, I use this film at 80.
• Fuji MS 100/1000. This slide film is rated from 100-1000, with the optimum at 400. I did some testing and found it scans a little soft at this speed.
• Fuji Provia 400F. This film does not scan that well regardless of the speed. I am currently testing various settings with Vuescan to optimize the scan quality with this film, and will update shortly.

Links and Related Pages

• Camera Gear with mini reviews
• Home of Vuescan
• Polaroid software download page (Mac/Win)
• Polaroid Scanner/Software manual download page