13 out of 13 people found this review helpful.
Good cheap scanner, but don't ever expect promised driver software!
Date of Review: May 6, 2007
The Bottom Line: A great cheap scanner, but if you have Windows Vista, do not consider the film-scanning feature to be of any use in the reasonably foreseeable future.
Mixed sentiments about this scanner:
Plain-paper scanning is excellent for such a cheap machine. Default chroma saturation is a bit weak, but that can be easily adjusted at software level. Scans made at the uppermost resolutions are naturally slow, but worth the trouble. The size of a 9600 DPI scan makes it possible to do Photoshop repairs that are, for all practical purposes, undetectable. This means that news media and commercial graphics interests are no longer the only segment of society that has a monopoly on deceptive photo alteration. Now any minimum-wage hairball with a c-note can do visual spin-doctoring just as easily!
The BAD news: This machine was sold as being "Vista-compatible." To my mind, this should mean that all of its capabilities are available for use right now, with Windows Vista.
Not so fast there, Sparky! The software hasn't been written "yet." However, Hewlett-Packard magnanimously allows that you can still use the scanner's "basic" features with the purportedly temporary driver software. Apparently, H-P doesn't feel that the film-scanning mechanism built into the lid of the scanner is a feature that a reasonable person would expect to actually use.
Two months elapse. I call H-P tech support, and after enduring the usual twelve-minute prostate exam, finally get to a real person with that adorable Quickie-Mart proprietor accent, who informs me that "there is no estimated time available."
So here's the deal: it's a good scanner for 99 clams, and that's all it is. If you have Windows Vista, despite the fact that H-P says it's compatible, consider the film scanning mechanism to be simply a hood ornament. H-P, for all practical purposes, apparently has no intention of ever making good their stated intention to make this part of the machine functional - and, for this reason, I'm giving it four stars instead of five.
