Review

Hewlett Packard PhotoSmart S20 Scanner

By David S. Lee, Cyberwalker Media Syndicate

The Hewlett Packard PhotoSmart S20 scanner is one of those things that you don't realize you need until you actually have one.

The ability to scan in negatives, slides, and prints all in one compact unit is a boon to any home office or family computer. You won't get the same quality image as you would from a dedicated slide or negative scanner, but scans produced by the S20 are quite acceptable.

This is a universal serial bus (USB) device, so the installation went smoothly and quickly. After unpacking, installation of the hardware and software took approximately 10 minutes. Be sure to follow the instructions in the manual to the letter, however, or installation may become unexpectedly complex.

In addition, it's worth noting that the PhotoSmart software bundled with the test machine failed to work perfectly until the TWAIN v1.2.1.2 software update and the PhotoSmart v1.3 update, available on the Hewlett Packard Web site, were installed.

The scanner also presented an unwelcome puzzle: during testing it failed to scan a whole strip of negatives, whether the strip was four frames or five frames in length. Hewlett Packard's technical support figured out that the problem was related to the Direct Memory Access (DMA) setting of the hard drive in Windows.

It turns out that if the scanner doesn't have a DMA-enabled hard drive to write to, the scanning software will lock up when processing a full strip of negatives. The O'Reilly Books Web site is helpful in explaining the world of DMA (http://www.ora.com/reference/dictionary/
terms/B/Bus_Master_Direct_Memory_Access.htm).

Once those hurdles were overcome, however, scanning slides, negatives and prints proved to be very easy.

There are several scanning options, although the PhotoSmart S20 was missing the ability to finely tune scans, as most scanning software allows.

Hewlett Packard had the foresight to bundle Microsoft's Picture It! 99 software with the scanner, however. It isn't Adobe Photoshop, but it allows you to adjust basic settings such as brightness and contrast, cropping, sizing and blurring and sharpening. It also includes some neat features, such as red-eye removal, wrinkle reduction and different frame effects, all packaged in a very easy to use interface.

You may find yourself using Picture It! 99 quite often for adjustment of the contrast in images. Generally speaking, the contrast did not match the contrast of the originals. It is quite easy to fix the contrast using the bundled software, but it is a pain to have to adjust scanned images every time you want to print them.

Scan time is quite reasonable, considering the scan resolution. For slides and negatives, the highest optical resolution is 2400 dots per inch (dpi). At that resolution, and using the "slower" setting under the preferences menu, a slide or negative took a little more than three minutes to scan.

The quality of the image was not as sharp as the resolution would suggest, however. While the scans were acceptable, at 100 percent zoom an image looked slightly blurred on-screen when compared with an image taken from a much more expensive slide-and-negative-specific scanner, such as the Nikon LS-30.

At a resolution of 300 dpi, it took about 25 seconds to scan a slide or negative and the quality of the image was acceptable in printouts. It was also acceptable on-screen, if the image wasn't blown up. As would be expected, a 300 dpi image suffers greatly when enlarged when compared to a 2400 dpi image.

Scanning prints was just as quick and easy. The highest resolution for prints is 300 dpi. At that setting, scans of four-by-six-inch prints took about a minute at the "slower" setting. Here, the unit performed like a flatbed scanner in terms of quality when compared to a Plustek FBIVP.

The weak point of the Photosmart S20 is that it cannot accept anything larger then a four-by-six-inch print -- or anything that cannot be fed into the front of the unit, for that matter.

Overall, the Hewlett Packard S20 Photosmart scanner is a good unit if you don't need high-quality scans and will be using it mainly to send images over the Internet. Users who want to print their scans, need high-resolution scans for archival purposes, or will need to scan images larger than four by six inches are better off getting a flatbed scanner and a separate negative scanner.

Reviewer's rating: 3 / 5

Comments: The Hewlett Packard S20 Photosmart scanner is a decent all-in-one scanner that does everything moderately well. Buying separate units for each duty may prove better in the long run if you need high-quality scans for printing.

Platform: PC
Maximum optical resolution: 2400 dpi for negatives and slides, 300 dpi for prints.
Maximum scanning area: four by six inches for prints.
Color?: Yes
Interface: USB
Software included: HP S20 Scanner Software, Microsoft Picture It! 99
Sheetfeed: Yes

More info: http://www.hp.com

Price: $450 US, $635 Canadian