Hewlett-Packard PhotoSmart S20

Here's a great product from HP that will let you scan in your photo collection, and store and manipulate it on your PC. This product can scan up to 5"x7" photos, slides and film strips including panoramic images of up to five frames. It does it all in a box of tricks that is small enough to sit on top of a tower case PC or in any spare corner of your desk.

Whirring, clicking and looking like a prop from a sci-fi movie, the S20's front-loading mechanism ingeniously changes at the push of a button, depending on which media you want to scan. We ran our usual scanner tests, bar the A4 OCR test, and the results were fairly impressive. Taking 17 seconds to preview the 5"x7" Agfa IT-8 test card, and a further 46 seconds to scan it at 300dpi over the USB interface, wasn't too bad.

By far the most important part of any scanning process is the resulting image, and the IT-8 scan was very good. We examined the histogram in Photoshop and found that the colours and greyscales had been scanned with good accuracy. Previewing a strip of four negatives took 44 seconds, but this included recognising and splitting up individual frames, another neat feature. Scanning one frame at 1200dpi took 52 seconds.

We were impressed that the S20 could cope with individual frames - handy if you have cut up your negatives. We scanned the colour negative version of the IT-8 at 2400dpi and were even more impressed with the results than for the printed version. Previewing a single slide took 16 seconds, and scanning it at 1200dpi took 51 seconds. Again, the scan looked extremely good.

As far as the specification for this device goes, the 2400dpi optical resolution for scanning slides or film beats any comparably priced flatbed scanner, and the results from the S20 are much better than you would achieve from a flatbed with a transparency adapter.

With the S20 you can restore old or faded media with just one click. We tried this with an old slide that had faded to leave a 'sepia' effect on it. Just by selecting the 'faded or old slide' option, the final scan looked almost completely natural.