>
> 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'd question that. I, too, had an S10, which I eventually replaced with
a Nikon Coolscan III. This was shortly before the S20 was released, I
believe - or was the S20 a USB device?
>From what I saw of scans from the S20 it was a significant improvement
over the S10 as a slide scanner, offering greater density. I found that
the S10, although perfectly adequate as a negative scanner, was not really
up to the task of scanning slides. The S20 also delivered better saturation;
it appeared to be pretty comparable to the results from the Coolscan III
(which would also make it similar to the LS-1000 another poster mentioned).
[For a comparison of the S10 to the Coolscan, see
http://www.panix.com/~johnf/digital/chart.html ]
The main drawback to the S20 is that, like it's predecessor, it was
somehat compromised by being designed as both a film scanner and a
print scanner (able to accept prints up to 5x7). This introduced
additional complication in both the mechanical feed and the optical
path. This sometimes led to difficulties on obtaining sharp images
(either because of film curvature, or because the film transport
didn't always move into quite the right position). It was also
rather difficult to remove dust if it got into the optical path.
