Highlights and Shadows: Polaroid’s Latest Multi-Format Film Scanner

CreativePro Staff

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Polaroid’s new SprintScan 45 Ultra multi-format film scanner looks a lot like its respectable predecessor — the SprintScan 45i — but Polaroid endowed the newer model with notable improvements, including increased resolution and optical density. The upshot is that this $7,495 (suggested retail) scanner is a capable choice for buyers who need a film scanner that can handle originals as large as 4 by 5 inches.

The SprintScan 45 Ultra improves upon its predecessor with a new 10,000-element CCD and an optical resolution of 2,571 by 2,751 dpi, producing very crisp scans. The 45 Ultra also utilizes a new 14-bit D/A converter (versus the 45i’s 12-bit converter) and a brighter light source. The changes boost optical density (Dmax) from 3.4 with the 45i to an impressive 3.8, giving the 45 Ultra exceptional ability to capture shadow detail.

Look and Feel
The 45 Ultra’s 25- and 50-pin SCSI-2 connectors afford easy connectivity with Macs and PCs. Also located at the rear of the chassis are a SCSI ID selector and another switch that controls the active SCSI termination. Because the 45 Ultra’s lamp is constantly illuminated while the unit is powered up, there’s also a fairly substantial and moderately loud cooling fan. The color temperature of the cold cathode lamp requires about three minutes to stabilize, so it’s probably worth leaving the unit powered up if you’ll be scanning items often.

Two sturdy film holders and several metal inserts let the 45 Ultra handle a single mounted 35mm slide, a group of four mounted 35mm slides, a single 6×6 cm or 6×7 cm cut negative or slide, or 4×5 film stock. Unfortunately, you’re out of luck if want to scan 35mm slides, or 6×4.5 cm or 6×9 cm originals. More important for many would-be buyers, you cannot scan strips of 35mm, APS, or 120/220 negatives or slides.

Software
Polaroid bundles the 45 Ultra with PolaColor Insight version 4.5 scanner driver, and Binuscan’s Photo Perfect Master version 4.4 for Mac OS and Windows 9X, NT 4.0, and 2000.

Insight, which includes profiles for 15 generic and specific monitors, can also find any specific monitor profiles on your system. While saving an image, it can embed your monitor’s profile with the scan data. In theory, at least, this will help promote good color matching when the image is opened in Photoshop or your favorite image-editing package.

Also supported by the driver are 20 input profiles that compensate for the differences among emulsions, letting it automatically optimize scan settings for a particular film, such as Kodak Kodachrome. When you want to utilize the 45 Ultra’s full 14 bits per channel to get a bit better detail in your scans, you’ll need to use one of two generic film profiles — color negative and color slide — which provide the full raw data captured by the scanner.

Mac users will appreciate the ability to start the Insight driver as a plug-in from within Photoshop. Both Mac and Windows users can benefit from the software’s ability to save the particular parameters associated with a scan — such as resolution, color correction, scaling, and others — as a named job-settings profile. These settings can then be easily applied to future jobs that have similar scan requirements. Another of Insight’s time-saving features lets users specify a file name that can be applied to a batch of images in sequence. For example, if scanning slides from the Grant wedding, Insight could start the filename of each scan with "Grant," leaving you to add only an identifying number to the batch name.

Under the Gun
To put the 45 Ultra to the test, we scanned several 4×5 B&W negatives, several 6×6 color transparencies, and a number of 35mm color transparencies in a variety of different mounts. We tested the scanner using a Pentium II-400 running Windows 98 with 128 MB of RAM and an Adaptec AHA-2940UW SCSI host adapter.

In general, the 45 Ultra did a good job of capturing images. In our tests, it delivered true colors and excellent shadow details. Scanning a 35-mm transparency at 2,500 dpi took 1 minute 52 seconds from start until the image had been scanned and processed by Insight. The result was a 19.7MB file. Scanning and processing a 4×5 image at the same resolution took just longer than 13 minutes. Polaroid touts 4×5 scan time as 5 minutes, but this spec’ refers only to the actual scan time, omitting the necessary Insight processing.

Our only notable complaint about the 45 Ultra’s scan quality came when scanning at resolutions other than 2,571 dpi, the unit’s optical, horizontal resolution: We noticed very fine vertical banding in our images once scaled to about 400 percent. According to Polaroid, the banding is attributable to the way the unit samples down from its native resolution to a lower resolution selected by the user. Such banding can be avoided by simply scanning at the optical resolution and resampling the scanned image down to the desired resolution in your image-editing software. Still, this approach will leave you with much larger scan files than you might otherwise have to deal with in some circumstances.

Final Word
Overall, the SprintScan 45 Ultra is an improvement over older Polaroid medium-format film scanners, and it lives up to the company’s claims. Its ability to capture large originals at 14 bits per channel and its short scan times would make it a worthy addition to a service bureau or busy lab. Buyers who need to scan strips of negatives or slides will need to look elsewhere, however. The banding we noticed when scanning at less than the 45 Ultra’s optical resolution will also be a drawback some would-be buyers will decline to accept.