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May 2000

Digital Photography: by John Rettie
Scan Photos or Buy a Digital Camera?


Last month I described the impressive quality of photographs captured by the Nikon D1 digital camera. The camera is ideal for many photographers, especially those shooting for news organizations and for those needing instantaneous processing of images for event or studio photography. The rest of us can, of course, still obtain good digital images for manipulation on a computer by scanning images stored on film with a good scanner.

This month I reviewed the Polaroid SprintScan 4000.

Compared to the rapid pace at which digital cameras are evolving, the evolution of film scanners is snail like. It's a shame as scanning in a color slide or negative is still a very cost effective way of obtaining decent digital images without having to invest in an expensive digital camera that uses interchangeable lenses. Of course the price of a good film scanner is still over $1000 which is about the same price as a good point-and-shoot digital camera. Considering that half way decent flatbed scanners are well under $300, it is a pity that film scanners have remained a high price item. It's largely due to the fact that demand for them is much lower than for flatbed scanners and also the technology involved in the scanning mechanism is more complicated and consequently more costly to manufacture.

For those photographers who have to digitize old photographs, a scanner is a necessity if one wishes to perform the task oneself. Among the limited choices of film scanners, Polaroid has produced some of the better scanners over the past few years. Its newest model is the SprintScan 4000, which as its name suggests, scans images at 4000 dots per inch (dpi). This is the highest resolution of any desktop film scanner on the market for under $5000. It also has an optical density of 3.4, which is much higher than other scanners that normally run up to a maximum of 3.2.
The Polaroid SprintScan 4000 (cost about $1600 on the street) is a desktop unit that hooks up to a Mac or PC via a SCSI cable. A carrier holds up to four mounted 35mm slides or a strip of negatives up to six frames in length and an optional adapter holds an APS film canister.

The Polaroid PolaColor Insight Pro software is a stand-alone program that can be operated independently or via a Photoshop plug-in. This is useful if you want to scan images without having to open Photoshop. The program needs to have a decent amount of memory (I used 32MB) allocated to it, which means you have to allocate less to Photoshop unless you have tons of memory on the computer.

The software offers a variety of tools for adjusting colors and sharpening images as they are captured. I found the software to be less intuitive than I'd have liked. It also had some annoying idiosyncrasies such as adjusting the area one cropped from the first menu to the final menu which meant readjusting the crop lines a second time. Another unfortunate design flaw allows the type of film chosen does not show up on the screen from the drop-down menu as the window is too small to show the complete line of text. If you forget to set the film type when you first run the program it defaults to the first choice on the list, which happens to be for Agfa negative film, although you cannot see this listed!

When you first start scanning, the program asks to have the slide carrier manually inserted until it engages in the toothed runner that controls its movement. It cannot be inserted before the software has loaded. Once this has been done, the program controls movement of the carrier from one frame to the next rather than it having to be manually moved as on some other scanners. Unfortunately, the software also has to eject the carrier, as it cannot be removed manually. I found myself exiting the program on some occasions before ejecting the carrier. I had to reload the program or even turn the computer back on in order to get the carrier out.

It takes just 14 seconds to obtain a quick preview scan of an image. Cropping and image adjustments as well as the required resolution are all set using this preview image. I found the automatic IQA (image quality adjusting) process often took over, although generally it did a good job of adjusting the quality of the image. Once the resolution has been set the full scan takes place, which takes about two minutes to produce a 4000 dpi scan. The final image can be up to 53 MB in size, depending on the cropping.

I compared an image captured on the Nikon D1 with one taken on a Canon EOS-1N on Fuji film and then scanned by the Polaroid scanner. The accompanying screen grab shows that there is actually more detail in the digital image than in the scanned image. But note that the scanned image is only shown at 33% of full size. Once the two images are blown up to 400% the Polaroid scan is much crisper. In reality, images printed up to 8x10 will be virtually identical but the Polaroid scans will likely be better for larger images.

If Polaroid can improve the user interface of the PolaColor scanning software, the SprintScan 4000 will be a formidable scanner for photographers looking for highly detailed digital images from pictures taken on a film camera
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Agfa ePhoto CL30 Clik!
Having discussed high-end prosumer cameras, which are capable of producing acceptable 8x10 prints for all but the most discriminating viewers, it's time to look at an entry-level camera, of which there are many on the market.
Agfa, the famous German film manufacturer, has been aggressively pursuing the digital camera marketplace just like its rivals Kodak and Fuji. A couple of years ago it had models that were aimed at the upper end of the market. Now though, it has made a conscious decision to concentrate on the lower end of the consumer marketplace. As a result it has cameras ranging in price from just $149 to $499, which is a much lower price range than those for most other makers of digital cameras.

I recently had the chance to use the new ePhoto CL30 Clik! model for a short time. This is a straightforward point-and-shoot camera with a fixed focal-length lens equivalent to 43mm on a 35mm camera. It looks just like a sturdy film camera with a built in flash and auto focus. The surround to the lens screws off to reveal a standard 37mm screw mount for filters and/or optional lenses. It features a one megapixel CCD that is definitely low-end nowadays in the world of 3.3 megapixel cameras. The camera includes Agfa's unique Photogenie software in the camera that interpolates the image size up to 1.5 million pixels, but that's never as good as having 1.5 million honest to goodness real pixels in the first place.

What is most unusual about the camera is its storage method. Instead of using floppy disks or the more ubiquitous Compact Flash cards, the CL30 Click!, as it's name suggests, uses a new storage medium called Clik!, which is produced by Iomega the well known maker of the Zip disk. It is the first camera on the market to make use of this alternative storage mechanism. The regular ePhoto CL30 uses compact Flash storage cards and is still on the market.

The Click! storage card is not quite as small as a Compact Flash card but it is much cheaper, costing only $10 versus around $150 for a CF card of similar capacity. The difference is that the Click! has a mechanism similar to a hard drive rather than solid-state flash memory. It sounds strange to hear a hard disk whirring sound as the camera saves data to the Clik! drive. Data is transferred to the PC rapidly through the included USB cable. Sadly the Iomega software for the Clik! drive only works on a PC.

The camera is pretty simple to operate. It has two switches and a thumb wheel on the back along with a LCD screen. One switch turns the camera on to record or play back mode, while the other turns the LCD screen on or switches the camera to the PC connection mode. The thumb wheel is used to scroll through images in the playback mode or it can be used to scroll through the numerous options in the different menus during recording or playback. The thumb wheel is turned to different option menus and pushed down to choose a parameter. A comprehensive range of options is available such as resolution, white balance, type of flash and focusing options. In the playback mode one can view images full screen, one at a time or view nine at a time in thumbnail view. It is also possible to zoom in to check details although the image is a bit too coarse to be of much value.

There's no denying that this is an entry-level camera. The image quality is okay to use for e-mailing images or posting images on the Internet. It'll also produce decent prints up to 4x5 but beyond that it will not meet the expectations of Rangefinder readers. If the Agfa camera sold for $199 I would recommend it as a camera for your kids, but at $499 it is difficult to justify. One is much better off paying a couple of hundred dollars more for a camera from Nikon, Olympus, Kodak or others, which offer more pixels for better image quality.

John Rettie is a photojournalist who resides in Santa Barbara, CA. He has been using a camera as a professional for 29 years, a computer for 19 years, and has combined his knowledge of both for the past seven years. Readers can contact him by e-mail at john@johnrettie.com or by snail-mail c/o Rangefinder.