I am looking for a scanner capable of scanning at 300 DPI for up to 11x14 or 16x20 prints. This would mean files of 40+ MB in TIFF format. Are there any options besides drum scanning my 35mm slides? Thanks

-- Ethan Janson (photographer@divephotos.com), April 10, 1999

Answers

The new Polaroid 4000 is 4000 dpi. That will give you 300 dpi printing resolution even for the 16x20. Of course, going to 16x20 from 35 mm is a strech even doing it photographically.

Polaroid scanning software is very bad, however. My Sprintscan 35+ software has no histogram. Withiout a histrogram you need to run the color picker over the entire image just to get an idea what the values are. The new sofwtare for the 4000 sounds worse, from early reports.

Anybody used the Polroid 4000?

-- Steve Bye (sbye@accesone.com), April 10, 1999.

Your 35mm slide (even if it's Royal Gold 25!) isn't going to have 100lp/mm resolution for your 300dpi @ 16x20. More than likely it won't even have that much information @ 11x14. If you really want files that big, you can get a Pro PhotoCD scan of them (~$15/ea) to see if you can really tell the difference.

-- Ben Jackson (ben@ben.com), April 11, 1999.