Re: filmscanners: Sprintscan 4000

[Bill Ross <ross@cgl.ucsf.edu>]

        This explains the sudden flurry of ebay sales.  I'm beginning to learn a
        valuable lesson... whenever I suddenly see a bunch of used items which 
        have been in demand show up together on ebay, a price cut is about to be
        announced.
        
        The ebay items sold for more or about this price.  I guess people take 
        advantage of the fact that many people are not informed of new price 
        drops, and dump their equipment in hopes of getting as much as possible 
        to replace it with newer stuff.

My take is that the people who always want the best-spec system
started moving up to the Nikon (bleeding edge & all) and started
dumping their Polaroids. Maybe others went to the new Kodak machine
for its roll-scanning ability. This caused a softening of the market
for new machines, so Polaroid followed the market - maybe even
using ebay to evaluate the numbers.

        I wonder if Polaroid is planning a new release soon?

Definitely the big question.. if they can add ICE or equivalent
functionality and increase the bit depth, they could re-take the
high end, based on their record of superior service & reliability,
and possibly better edge-to-edge sharpness.  Scan speed may be a
factor too? ..Otherwise they'll be competing at the second tier 
for the time being.

I wish some of these people who I hypothesize are moving from 
Polaroid to Nikon would put some side-by-side evaluations of their
machines on the web before selling the Polaroid - I'd like to see
how the edge sharpnesses compare and how discernable the color
differences are. 

Bill Ross