Guide to installing a Polaroid 'SprintScan CS-4000' on a PC
This page was written by Christopher Spry. The Guide is designed for those who are considering buying, or have just bought, a Polaroid SprintScan CS-4000 to use for scanning photographic slides, to make computer graphics files.
Polaroid used to provide PDF Guides on how to setup and use the scanner, but these seem to have disappeared from their web site: ‘SprintScan 4000 QuickStart Guide’, ‘SprintScan 4000 QuickStart Guide Errata’, ‘SprintScan 4000 How to Load the APS Film Carrier’, ‘SprintScan SCSI Troubleshooting Guide-WinNT4’, a Users Guide and technical support on-line, for this scanner and the Insight software. There is good telephone support in the U.K. at +44-1582-632244. Information and discussion on the Polaroid scanner and its software is available at the public Usenet newsgroup alt.comp.periphs.scanner.
Polaroid SprintScan 4000
Description: The 'SprintScan CS-4000' is claimed by Polaroid to be the world's first 4000 dpi slide scanner, scanning slides in less than one minute. It is a high-end device, making professional and high quality scans from 35mm slides, conventional negatives or the Advanced Photo System (APS). It accepts 35mm positive and negative photographs, film strips and APS-Films. It can be used in 12 bit per colour mode with a 3,4 optical density range which is suited for magnification of detail. The maximal resolution is 4,000 x 4,000 dpi. It provides new possibilities for inkjet prints in large formats. The scan time for single photographs is about 1 minute. It is provided with software to control the scanner, called PolaColor Insight Pro. It uses a SCSI-interface and can be used on a Mac and on a PC running Windows, including Windows 98/NT/2000.
The product: I am in the U.K. I received the hardware on 24/12/1999. I was provided with a CD containing software (PolaColor Insight Pro v 3.5) to run the scanner, but I advise users not to install this version of the software, but to download and install the newer version 4.
I received the APS adapter in January 2000. This was a Microtek APS cartridge holder model 'MTS-4000 APS' for the Polaroid film scanner model CS-4000. It was provided with a diagram of how to insert, but not how to remove it from the scanner. This can not be done manually. It has to be done by switching the scanner off then on, or in software.
SCSI connection: The
SCSI connection is as described in the 'Installation QuickStart' manual. An additional
requirement, that is not documented there, is that the BIOS has to be set so
that the SCSI device is limited to a speed of < 20-MB/sec. I had to alter
the SCSI functions of SCSI 4, which was the setting of the Polaroid
scanner as follows:
Setting
|
Initial
|
Changed
to
|
Initiate Sync negotiation |
yes |
no |
Maximum transfer rate |
80.0 |
20.0 |
Send start init command |
no |
yes |
Note that SCSI negotiates the maximum speed between any two SCSI devices. These are normally the host adapter and a single device being used. The speed of the SCSI bus is not the speed of the slowest device. If you had a slow device on your SCSI bus, the device would take a long time compared to a faster devices. It could delay, in that way, a faster device which was using the SCSI bus at the same time. When a SCSI device is not being used, its setting has no effect on the speed of other SCSI devices.
Installation:
Download and install the latest hardware drivers and software and install them under Windows 2000. Each time that I have done this, there have been a range of problems, but in the end I was able to get the scanner to work well.
Colour film for scanning:
Kodak has details of Kodak Professional Supra 400 film, which is excellent for scanning.
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