Scanning. The HP Photosmart scanner is great value for money, being a three-in-one scanner with the ability to scan slides, negatives and prints (up to 4R size) This page has  tips and  optimisations for users of the HP Photosmart Scanner.

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PScan32. An alternative driver
Check out Lenik Terenin's PScan32- his attempt to make suitable software for HP PhotoSmart scanner. It is small, fast and reliable. It does scanning and nothing else but scanning. 
 

PScan32 Page


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NEW HP S20 Photosmart Scanner.19 February 1999
HP will be releasing a new Photosmart Scanner, the S20 Photosmart Scanner and that Steve Hoffman has done a review of it! The new S20 Photosmart Scanner has the following features:-
    • Looks the same as the old Photosmart Scanner but internally, the electronics has been redesigned
    • 36 bit, 2400 dpi (optical) scanner and outputs to sRGB. 
    • TWAIN compliant and when used as a TWAIN acquire the S20 can import all 36 bits of

      • color information into your imaging program. 
    • The power supply is internal. 
    • USB connection only
    • new interface, allows for batch scanning.
    Release date is said to be 1 April 1999.Looks like the problems with the old Photosmart Scanner have been addressed, and quite successfully too from Steve's review. Steve found the image quality of the scans much improved over the old model.  Drop by at Steve Hoffman's excellent site at http://niftywebs.com and his REVIEW of the S20! (review rated  aka 'must-see')

 

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Steve  Hoffmann's Photosmart Review. Cool Site
Steve Hoffmann's PhotoSmart Scanner and printer User's Review. This is an excellent website for those planning to buy the Photosmart system. Steve's review is thorough and very informative. Great place to start reading about the capabilities of the Photosmart Scanner. Steve's page also has information on driver patches and other technical information on the Photosmart scanner.

 Steve Hoffmann's 
Photosmart Page
 

 

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Steve  Hoffmann's Nikon LS2000 Review.22 September 1998
    Steve Hoffman recently informed rec.photo.digital of his review of the Nikon LS2000:-
     
      "I've updated, expanded and moved my review of the LS2000 film scanner. It is now quite detailed and full featured. It includes graphic representations of the software interfaces and explanations of all of the scanner's operational features. Included are sample comparisons of the Digital ICE and 16X sampling technologies. I also have two pages of screen capture comparison images between this scanner and the Hewlett-Packard Photosmart film scanner.  You can see the difference between the best valued desktop film scanner, the HP, and probably the best quality desktop film scanner in the LS2000 by visiting this site.
    Have a look at his comprehensive review which also has scan pictures from both the LS2000 and the trusty HP Photosmart Scanner. Tech-talk aside, Steve's pictures are also excellent!

Steve's LS2000 review

 


Scan comparisons


 
 
 
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Comparison of Scanners. Scan samples
 
Have a look at Tony Sleep's website Tony Sleep Photography Site for his detailed reviews of many scanners. Includes scan samples obtained from the various scanners using the calibration slide, Kodak Q60 Slide.

     
 

 
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Vuesmart at Version 7.2.21 February 1999
I had been using Vuesmart Version 4.4 all this while and had trouble-free use so far. In fact, color accuracy was better with Version 4.4 (over previous versions). Just read over at the newsgroups that Ed Hamrick has made available Version 7.2 of Vuesmart. which has the following new functions:-
  • The amount of memory to use for buffering can now  be entered in Advanced options mode.
  • Film scanned at 2400 dpi, 1200 dpi, and 600 dpi have   a dpi in the crop file set to 300, 150, and 75,  respectively.  This makes scanned 35mm film print  out at approxmately 8x10 inches by default.
  • The VuePrint serial number can be entered directly  in the Help dialog box.
  • Version numbers synchronized with VuePrint.
Vuesmart is available at:-
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Hamrick's Vuesmart Page.

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Vuesmart at Version 4.4.3 February 1999

Yes, yes....Ed Hamrick's Vuesmart, an alternative to the HP-supplied scanner driver, has gone through yet another version update and  is now at Version 4.4. This release is even better than the last one (i've lost track). Has lots of enhancements that improve colour accuracy. I love it! I was unable to get a good scan from a difficult neg once but now the neg scans great with the Vuesmart. The batch scanning feature is still its best asset and you can get Vuesmart to re-crop after scanning using different settings. In short, you only need to scan your negs/slides once and it can do multiple crops of the same scanned image using different settings (eg after adjusting the brightness, etc). A great time saver indeed.. Get it at  Hamrick's Vuesmart Page.
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Vuesmart 3.1 vs Photosmart Driver.15 December 1998
Hot off the press! Here's Kar Yan's latest article...VueSmart 3.1 vs Photosmart Driver. The latest version of VueSmart now reviewed by Kar Yan as well (check out her previous article on Version 1.3). 

Check out Kar Yan's latest Article!

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Kar Yan looks at Vuesmart 2.0.11 November 1998

Kar Yan is fast becoming my favourite contributor! Just hours after Ed released his Version 2.0, Kar Yan contibuted a short article on her experiences with Version 2.0. Have a look here.

 

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Vuesmart 1.3 vs HP Photosmart Driver.4 November 1998
Received a nice word of encouragement from Kar Yan of Hong Kong one fine day for the site and was in the process of replying to her when I noticed a link in her email to her home page. Needless to say I clicked on the link to her site and soon found my way at her photography site which has many really good shots. To cut the long story short, she has now contributed an article on a direct comparison between Ed Hamrick's VueSmart 1.3 and the HP supplied Photosmart Driver. Very interesting not the least because she has also contacted Ed Hamrick who replied to her queries and her request for his comments on her article. Until today, I didn't know that the HP driver did  a "sharpen" when it scans. That would explain the noise that appears on some images.  Check out Kar Yan's article.

 

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Ed Hammrick's Vuesmart Driver
An alternative to HP's own photosmart drivers, try Ed Hamrick's (of Hamrick Software) DOS-based driver for the HP Photosmart Scanner called Vuesmart, now into version 0.9a.  Here's Ed's description of VueSmart:-
    VueSmart 0.9a.Ed Hamrick
    July 25, 1998

    The PhotoSmart scanner hardware is capable of scanning at 30-bit per pixel resolution, while other 30-bit film scanners cost more than twice as much. In addition, the PhotoSmart scanner is capable of scanning slides, negatives, and prints. However, the HP-supplied software only reads data from the scanner at 24-bit resolution, which limits the scan quality. This is especially evident when scanning the dark area of slides. In addition, the HP-supplied software doesn't allow scanning of mounted negatives, unmounted slides, or panoramic images, doesn't allow fast batch scanning, and isn't supported on Windows NT.

    We've developed a program called VueSmart that does these things and more. Please feel free to download and test it - it's a free add-on for registered VuePrint users. The file is about 190 KBytes, which should take about a minute to download.

     It has been tested with the HP PhotoSmart firmware levels 0.29, 0.30, and 0.32, and has also been tested with the HP 6100C and HP 5100C scanners.

    Prerequisites:
    1) Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0
    2) ASPI installed (c:\windows\wnaspi32.dll exists)

    Purchasing and redistribution:
    You need to purchase a US$40 VuePrint license to use VueSmart past the 15-day trial period.  The latest versions of VueSmart and VuePrint can be downloaded and purchased from: http://www.hamrick.com/. There are no restrictions on the redistribution of the shareware version of VueSmart.

     
    Main Features Of VueSmart 0.9a
    • Fast batch scanning 
    • Automatic cropping 
    • Scanning mounted color negatives 
    • Scanning unmounted slide film 
    • Scanning at 30-bits per pixel 
    • Saving raw 30-bit data to TIFF file 
    • Scanning panoramic images 
    • Automatic orange mask removal from color negatives 
    • Automatic removal of dust spots . 
 
 
 
 
 
 


www.hamrick.com 

 


Hamrick's VueSmart Page



 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

     
 

 
 
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Wayne Fulton's Scantips.30 September 1998

    Visit Wayne Fulton's excellent site for tips on scanning!  Covers many topics such as:-
        1.Video Resolution - How much to scan?
        2.Printing Resolution - What is scaling? What is Resampling?
        3.Printer Resolution - How much to scan?
        4.Photo resolution - How much can we scan?
         
         
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HP Photosmart Scanner Survey.18 January 1999
If you've ever had banding issues with your HP Photosmart Scanner (see sample image at left), you're not alone. Here's Art Entlich's survey concerning the banding problem of the HP PhotoSmart slide and film scanner. Art's survey was completed in December 1998 but due to my Aussie holiday, I've only been able to post it today (sorry folks!). Check it out!

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Link's Galore. A listing of Great Links

  • A Comparison: Nikon LS-1000 & HP PhotoSmart

    • Scanner
     
  • Programming the HP PhotoSmart Scanner byMatt Considine - a site with a how-to on programming your HP Photosmart Scanner. Here's a blurb from the page- "Contrary to what HP says, the Photosmart scanner does support SCL (it can also export 30bit data and do a crude grayscale, FWIW). This allows for programming of the scanner without using TWAIN or the interface that ships with the scanner. This is most easily accomplished using HP's SCL Toolkit and a C-compiler such as Microsoft's Visual C++. What follows are my notes on how I figured out how to program the scanner. I will expand these notes as more information is available (or I find out that I forgot to mention

    • something)."
     
  • Eddie's HP-Photosmart page  - Eddies' review of the Photosmart scanner.
     
That's all for now

 
 
 

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 All rights reservedTham Kok Leong 1998@Singapore
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