gary_bentley

<p>I would suggest that design is quite distinct from the matter of generating web traffic, though it is true to some extent that good design (and good content) will increase the popularity of your site. How do people find out about your site? Just looking at the millions of pages that come up in a typical SERP (search engine result page) on a keyword(s) tells you that SEO (search engine optimization, the largely smoke and mirrors game of convincing folks that adjusting keywords or other text in your website will bring you closer to that ideal first SERP, top of page) is unlikely to help, particularly in the short term. Viral advertising, word of mouth basically, works well in and out of the Internet world, i.e., if people are talking about your site, more people will visit it, and more people will talk, and so on. Having your website URL on all media you use is also a good idea (things like business cards, your email signature, professional brochures, signage, etc.). Web 2.0 channels are increasingly important, so put up YouTube video and mention the site, have a Facebook presence, Twitter folks about updates to your site. All that being said, if you want instant results, you cannot beat pay per click, e.g., Google Adwords. It is easy to set up and use and you can control the amount you spend by day and month in order to basically bid for the keywords most likely to catch Internet searchers and present them with a blurb on your site at the top of the first page of search results (and Google provides free tools to tell you what the trafiic is on particular key words, as well as the typical cost to bid sufficiently high to win that keyword at a given time).<br>

Gary Bentley</p>

As far as I know so far (and I am just getting my feet wet with the S20, in fact should be scanning my first color negatives later today) the white card calibration is the only calibration required, and it may well apply only to reflective media (as was pointed out above), making the logical assumption that it would sense light passing through a translucent medium like a negative or slide, i.e., sensors below the media, and sense the reflected light from a print, i.e., sensors above the media. The HP documents at their website describe a scanner diagnostics test (Hpi_Diag, supplied with the S20 software) that tests the light path without a calibration card to perform slide mode calibration. It apparently checks the gain on the red, green and blue channel sensors below the slide/negative path via the unimpeded light from the xenon lamp above the slide/print path. Another clue that there are in fact separate photosensors is the fact that print media (reflective) has a maximum optical resolution scan of 300 pixels/inch whereas negative media can be scanned at 2400 pixels/inch (although admittedly that could be under firmware control). If all goes well today, I'll try to post a sample scanned negative image of some paintings I shot with 35 mm color film last night (not that my preliminary experiments will be of much interest to experienced photographers, but in the interests of chronicling the use of the S20 in the present context).

Darned if you weren't right! I just found the 1997 HP response to the issue of a lost calibration card--use a 5 x 7 sheet of white paper! Thanks for the tip. As far as my concern about more complex color profile correction, another HP document states that the color correction algorithms in the S20 use film dependent parameters measured directly from the film during pre-scan, more or less adjusting automatically to the film type. I'm off to shoot some 35 mm color film and scan those bad boys in!

That would be pretty amusing if a blank white card was all they were looking for. As to finding the reference at HP, I'll give it another try, but hadn't found any reference to calibration previously other than the reference to the card included with the scanner. After I posted this I immediately discovered my naivete as far as talking about "printing out a test target." At least, as far as actually doing ICC color calibration. I looked at another posting previously here and found a site that offers precision targets, which are high quality film (very unlikely you could print something of that quality) with an associated data file which documents the proper color profile response to the target (I presume). Kodak apparently has a test slide available as well. A white card sounds do-able though <g>.

I was recently given an HP S20XI film scanner. Do I have to use the

HP calibration card that originally accompanied the unit in order to

calibrate it? The problem is, I don't have any of the original items

that came with the unit and I don't want to pay $7 plus shipping for

a card (if it is still available) if I can simply download a

suitable calibration card pattern somewhere and print it out for use

(assuming I could print it at sufficient density to be of any use in

calibration, which is indeed a good question). I would hope HP

didn't actually program the calibration specifically to their test

card. Anyone using this scanner who can tell me more? Thanks.