I am in the market to buy my first film scanner and printer. It looks like Polaroid is raising the dpi bar. Is this overkill or required for 8x10 or larger prints. I can afford the $2k but want to get the most value for by buck. Quality matters. I expect to print up to 11x14.

-- Chris Hetlage (chrishet@aol.com), April 07, 1999

Answers

I'm waiting to find out the same info. Which to buy? I've been looking at the Nikon scanner forum and find some people are having problems with various aspects of the LS 2000 but the 16 times sampling is sure interesting. I called Polaroid and they are sending me a flyer on the 4000. One review I found seemed to like the older Sprintscan 35 Plus almost as good as the LS 2000.

The LS 2000 will not give you 300 dpi on an 11X14 print. The 4000 would allow you to crop the picture a little and still get 300 dpi on an 8X10.

I think I'll wait for a little while to decide. I would like to see what the 4000 would do with the train picture that Dave Etchells uses in his reviews. Its the best picture for evaluating the shadow detail in any review I've see so far.

-- Robert Johnson (rjjohnson@silverlink.net), April 08, 1999.

Keep your fingers crossed - we spoke with Polaroid about testing the 4000, and they seemed interested: We've just been too busy the last month or so to apply the necessary hounding to get a unit in. A lot of people seem to love their SprintScans, so it will be interesting indeed to see what the 4000 does with some of our test subjects. (That train picture is just about *impossible* for any of the CCD units to handle - The LS-2000 did the best job so far, but it took every trick in the book and a lot of fiddling to get it as good as it came out. - I truthfully had no idea what a tough subject I was coming up with when I pulled that one out of the file!)

As to the dpi, 4000 dpi very possibly is overkill: You're going to end up just scanning the grain at some point. - Check the LS-2000 review, we have a max-res scan sample there, with a little unsharp masking applied in Photoshop, and the grain is fairly obvious. OTOH, it's not a bad idea to overkill wherever you can, to keep from losing any detail at any step of the process...

-- Dave Etchells (detchells@imaging-resource.com), April 13, 1999.

I'm an owner of an HP Photosmart (original) scanner, and am looking to step up to a higher quality unit. I've looked at the Canon 2710, Minolta Dimage Scan Speed, Nikon LS2000 and the Polaroid. I am also interested in high quality output up to 11 x 14, although most work will be 8x10. If you do the math, using either a Fuji 3000 or 4000 at 267 or 320 ppi, or a LighJet at 302ppi, or a inkjet printer at 300ppi, with the 2700-2800ppi scanners you have enough info for an 8x10 with either no cropping or minor interpolation to get to 320ppi (Fuji). To get to 11x14, you are faced with interpolating new pixels, either in Photoshop, the printers themselves (my understanding is that the Lightjet will do this), or whatever. With 4000ppi, you have enough info to cover 11x14 and will be down-sampling (much preferred) to get to most smaller print sizes.

I can't cost-justify the $1800 or so for the Polaroid - the Nikon (after rebate and taxes) is about $1500 and the Minolta is around $1100, which is closer to my pain threshold. If you have the money and the new Polaroid works as advertised, go for it - I tend to believe that with better and better output, and finer and finer- grained films, that you probably could use the "extra" pixels...

I'm probably going to go with the Minolta (I played with it for an hour at the store and between the added bit depth and higher resolution, it gives better scans than the (old) Photosmart. I tried a high-contast slide and the shadow noise was very low. I'll probably use Genuine Fractals to scale images for larger print sizes - it seems to work pretty well (version 2.0).

Michael

-- Michael Moy (mdmsam@bigfoot.com), April 19, 1999.

I bought a Sprintscan 4000 a month ago. I chose it over the Nikon Coolscan 2000 for the larger prints it makes possible. I have made a series of 13x19 inch prints on an Epson Stylus Photo 1200 from scans of Kodachrome, Reala, Fujichrome 200, Royal Gold 25. The prints are of extraordinary quality. If you're at all interested in printing larger than 8x10, you should try to get the Sprintscan 400.

-- Paul Bernbach (pbernbach@aol.com), August 12, 1999.

I have owned a Nikon LS-2000 since just after they came on the market. It is a wonderful scanner. Contrary to some of the earlier answers posted above, you can go as low as 200 pixels per inch and have absolutely perfect printed out hard copy photos. This means that a full scan of a 35mm slide would yield 12.8" by 19.5" prints. Perhaps some specialized publishing printers may require a higher line count, or whatever, but I have printed out photos on both a photo quality ink jet (Canon BJC 8200) and a dye sublimation printer at 200 ppi. To the naked eye the photos are indistinguishable to conventional photo store photographic prints. Now if you really want, you could crank up the pixels per inch in your final prints if you wish, but you won't see any difference on paper.

I am sure that in side by side tests the Nikon LS 2000 would blow away the Polaroid in quality (just look at the dynamic range of both scanners).

With the very recent introduction of the Nikon 4000 ED film scanner the whole argument is moot. Go with the 4000 ED.

-- Robert J. Shem (bobshem@alaska.com), April 15, 2001.