Customer Reviews

HP PhotoSmart S20xi Photo Scanner

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

After reading review after review for film scanners I decided to purchase the HP S20xi and I don't regret it. If I properly exposed a slide in the first place I hardly need to make any adjustments to the scanned sample. The S20xi scans my color and chromogenic negatives wonderfully. The scanning software that is including in the box is good. With it you can crop, adjust brightness, shadow areas, colors, etc. before you perform the actual scan. My only complaint so far (I've only had it for three days and I've scanned about 60 pictures so far) is the dust. I have a light box and I clean the neg/slide until I'm sure it's spotless before I put it in the scanner. The scanned image still has some dust spots and I've use air on the scanner to no avail. It's not too big of a deal to me to remove the dust spots using Photoshop, but it would be nice if the scanner had ICE or at least was willing to let my air remove the dust! Overall, I'm very happy with the S20xi...if you want to enhance your images for personal digital printing or simply archive your photo library to CD (as I'm doing), the S20xi is a good alternative to higher priced scanners.

I have an earlier SCSI version of this scanner (over 6 years old now and it still works great, how many IT products can you say that about?). In fact, it was my first scanner of any sort. It is a dependable workhorse that produces quality scans. The feeder for slides, film strips and prints is convenient. I use it to scan my 35 mm slides for submission to a magazine I contribute to and have had many published, some directly from the scans. It is rare that I ever scan above 600x800, even for direct publication. It is also a workhorse for my scans for web publishing and digital archiving. This scanner is the single best IT investment I have made over the years. HP's web site does include XP drivers for this scanner.

This scanner will do what the ads and reviews say it will do. This scanner does nice work on reproduction of family photos and slides into small paper prints. Resolution is marginal for display prints (depending on the slide and how large you want to go). I have used this scanner to archive 30 years of family and travel slides and am happy with the result. Now I am ready to start on film larger than 35mm and must turn to another scanner. I also would like to print 11x14 inch photographs and will have to rescan slides with a higher resolution machine. Keep in mind that this scanner will do the job it is intended to do but not much more.

I bought my HP S20 last year and have had great success with it. The setup is easy (USB) and the scans are fast and accurate. Photoshop quickly corrects any color problems. However, after using a Nikon with Ice3 (cubed) I must say that I am trading up. No longer having to remove dust and marks from my scans will save me hours of tedious Photoshop work. HP, please add ICE!

I've owned this scanner for almost 1-1/2 years and love it.I agree with the one reviewer about not being able to adequately clean the dust off but it's easy enough to remove any spots with PhotoShop. I like being able to have one scanner for all film types and I have lots of slides. I now just process film...and use the scanner to get the pix into my computer. I never buy prints anymore, why bother!

I bought S20xi recently and it produces good pictures at 2400dpi (but a bit more grainy in areas, like blue sky). The HP scanning software is very handy to use, including adjustments for exposure, color, sharpness and viewing histogram before the final scan. And it works fine on my W2K PRO/SP2 and W98 machines. The scan speed is not super fast, but it is ok for my personal use. The one complaint I have about the scanner is that it does not bundle any popular photo editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop Elements or even Microsoft Picture-It (...), while it comes with Ulead PhotoImpact4.2. You do need to use the above programs to remove dust/spot and scratch from time to time.

So far I have scanned over 700 out of the 2500 35mm slides my father took in the '70s . I scan at the highest 2400 DPI resolution, entire image. I have had no problems whatsoever with this scanner. For $... the HP Photosmart is an unbelievable steal -- almost an impulse buy in comparison to the $...+ scanners available.

I was worried about these slides degrading and the fact that nobody uses the projector anymore. Now the slides cannot degrade and are easily burned to CD for sharing with family.

Details:

This scanner scans slides and negatives not at 1600 DPI, not at 1800 DPI, but at 2400 DPI. At this resolution you can easily blow up photographs, find hidden closeups. I was able to zoom in on a family member's watch at 25 feet and tell the time, or zoom in in on a 2mm object in a 5x7 photo and tell that it is a "no parking" sign. As it is, a 2400 DPI full size TIFF takes up 20Mb of disk space. More resolution and you will have outrageously large files, unless you want to use lossy JPEG compression. You will most likely need to purchase a big hard drive and extra RAM if you are archiving many slides or negatives, but with the low price tag of this scanner you can buy drive and memory with the money you save.

Installation was a snap. Simply install the driver software, stick the scanner in the USB port and you're good to go. The scanning software is easy to use. It takes about one minute to preview, size, and scan a slide. The software allows you to save a size filter so you can don't have to adjust the preview borders for every image.

The HP Photosmart software does not come with many bells and whistles. The multimedia organizer software from Broderbund is next to useless. The ArcSoft PhotoImpression software is also next to useless, unless you like running silly filters on photos. It does not have a good auto levels, auto contrast, or auto color, or dust correction, or anything. It allows you to crop and rotate images and remove redeye. I'd recommend checking out ACDSee or freeware image browsers. The scanning software does not include curve tools or ICE/GEM image enhancement. However, you can always purchase Photoshop and the correction plug-ins from Applied Science Fiction. You may also want to check out batch image processing applications like Debabelizer or RoboEnhancer for ACDSee. Some of these tools I have not yet purchased -- merely researched on the net.

A few places for improvement:

1. The scanning software cannot save TIFFs using deflate/ZIP or LZW compression. Zip compression decreases image size on disk by about 20-25 percent.
2. It would be nice if it supported batch scanning of slides with a tray, but for $... I won't complain.
3. Negatives don't seem to scan as well as slides, but that could be because negatives deteriorate faster than slides.
4. It would be nice if the scanning software had auto edge detection for images and default to that so you wouldn't need to run a size filter on every slide.

All in all, the HP Photosmart is a winner. Don't spend money on resolution and features you don't need. Save money for a system upgrade. Get this baby and you're ready to rock.

The set up was easy. Please note that Windows XP will not support two scanners plugged in at once. This gave me some problem until I figured it out, and un-plugged the other scanner.
The slide scanner is great I would rate it 4 1/2 stars.
It is great on Slides (35MM) but won't do medium (120) format slides.
This is a down side for me.
It is a little slow but still gives a excellant image.
Be sure to dust off the sides and negetives before inserting them. This saves on image clean up later.
All in all I am very pleased with this product!

This scanner is incompatible in windows 2000 pro. HP Tech support said that a win 2000 driver is not being developed.
I did not want to upgrade my scanner, but now I have no choice.

I am a photographer and I've used this tool almost everyday for five years. At 16 bit, 2,400 dpi this scanner makes a 40 mg file. This scanner is easy to use, reliable, an incredible bargain. If you don't need resolution above 2,400 dpi you can't miss with this gem.