Having just read the review of the HP S20 scanner I was interested to compare the sample pix with those of the Nikon LS30. I compared the jpegs in photoshop and the HP looked terrible with loads of noise and banding in the shadows compared to just a smidgen for the LS30 and almost none for the LS2000. This heartened me tremendously having just forked out #600 for an LS30 a few months ago. I can't really believe that the HP's results should look so shabby for a 36bit machine. Am I doing something wrong?

-- Gareth Strong (GarethStrong@i.am), July 08, 1999

Answers

Interesting! - I didn't see that, but then didn't really dig around that deeply in Photoshop. - The S20 did a respectable job on our ultra-dense "train" shot, and I didn't really look further. Banding could be JPEG differences - we have to JPEG the files to get them on the site, but I'm pretty sure we've used a setting of "9" in most of the shots to minimize these problems. (We used "8" earlier, but switched to 9 more recently for improved quality.) Which specific shots did you find the problems in?

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), July 08, 1999.