Rick Samco compared these two scanners here:
Up until I saw this I was quite keen to trade my Artixscan 4000T (SS4000
clone) for a Nikon largely for ICE. After all de-spotting is a nightmare
except on very clean images.
I have yet to find any thing other than a clone tool that removes the dust
spots from my A4000T scans. I have discovered however that by not looking at
your images at all before scanning (I use slides) you can minimise the
de-spotting to about 5 minutes max. Obviously this isn't much good for old
slides. I have some family slides ([not] cared for by my Dad) which it would
take many hours to clean up. I only have a 17" monitor and have to look at
about 40 screen fulls to check one image for dust spots, but if you have a
huge monitor this is probably much easier.
On examining Rick's samples I decided that the Nikon seemed to have very
slightly better sharpness and detail but turning on the ICE made it very
slightly worse. This was reasonably acceptable, but the Nikon seems to also
produce very grainy scans and the only cure is GEM which softens images
quite badly. I have quite enough trouble with grain so I decided to stick
with the A4000T.
Steve
----- Original Message -----
From: "Barbara & Martin Greene" <martbarb@earthlink.net>
To: <filmscanners@halftone.co.uk>
Sent: Saturday, September 15, 2001 1:41 PM
Subject: filmscanners: Dust in Sprintscan 4000?
> I've been told that the Polaroid Sprintscan 4000 does not exaggerate dust
> and crud to the same extent that the Nikon LS 4000 does. I've examined
> Photo CD scans and found that, while there is much less, nevertheless a
good
> deal of spots show up. Perhaps, dust is a problem in every scanner. I'd
> appreciate if users of the Sprintscan would tell me just how much stuff
> shows up in their slide scans. With a reasonably clean slide, just how
much
> work has to be done using the rubber stamp in Photoshop to get a really
> clean 13 x 19 print? Also, if you use a dust removal software program,
such
> as Polacolor, Silverfast, or vuescan, how helpful is that? If such a
> program is used, to what extent does it soften the image and can that be
> restored using unsharp mask.
>
> Martin
>
