William Robb wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "Shel Belinkoff"
Subject: Re: New scanner
Is a 2400 dpi HP S20 a film scanner?
What about comparisons with a 2800 dpi film scanner? Have you had a
chance to
compare?
A big part of why I'm asking is that I want to get a scanner, but maybe an inexpensive one just for proofs, letting the nearby lab make the really hi
res
scans for final printing of those photographs I want printed via inkjet or other means other than in the wet darkroom.
The HP S20 is the old Hewlitt Packard Photosmart scanner. It was an inexpensive, but surprisingly good scanner for it's time. I had it's predecssor, the S10, which IIRC, wasn't improved on very much with the new model. I am a lot happier with my Epson 2450 flatbed than I was with the HP. The scans are faster, and I think the bit depth is greater as well, though the scan is the same dpi.
S20 is 24bpi or 48bpi selectable.
The digital printer I use at work prints at 320 dpi, so I can get an 8x12 print from a scan off the flatbed without a heck of a lot of interpolation (which I don't think is the big evil people make it out to be). All you get from a greater dpi scan is the ability to make a bigger print before you start interpolating data (which I don't think is the big evil people make it out to be). The nice thing about these Epson flatbeds is their ability to scan a dozen 35mm negatives at a time. This is a huge time saver over what I used to use, which was limited to a strip of 4, and having to use 3rd party software to scan the entire film strip.
Both the S20 software and Silverfast will scan a whole strip (up to 5 frames negative, or 4 slides) at once. However that does not seem to be documented in the manual. Just hold down the control key and select each of the images you want to scan, just like selecting multiple files in Windows in other words. Thef HP software is suprisingly good once you figure it out, I saw no reason to buy Silverfast after using the trial version for awhile.
And it was slow.
Don't know how the S20 speed is compared to newer film scanners but I think it is quite a bit faster than the S10 was.
The Epson is fairly quick, though no consumer level scanner that I have seen matches the speed of a commercial scanner, such as the Noritsu strip scanners on their digital printers. OTOH, they are scanning at a mere 2000 dpi.
William Robb
-- graywolf http://graywolfphoto.com
"You might as well accept people as they are, you are not going to be able to change them anyway."
