Scanner Reviews

Completely useless, bad quality, clunky, and doesn't support anything but Win 98. I tried to download the updated drivers and all I got was a corrupt file error. Don't waste your money!

I figured I was taking a gamble paying so little for a scanner. We are on a tight budget so the price was right. I thought it would be slow with low quality results. I don't require ultra-high quality scans or high speed but I still figured I might end up returning it and having to pay more. I was very much wrong. First thing I did was scan a color photo. The quality was excellent even though I only scanned at the default 200dpi and 24bit color. Our old printer does not do the printout justice (next purchase will be a higher quality printer). I have a $ Hewlett Packard scanner at work that is not as fast, as high quality, or as user friendly. The second thing I scanned was a typewritten page into MS Word. The OCR worked great! I've played quite a bit more and continue to be impressed. Setup was easy. I was up and scanning within 15 minutes (probably less) of opening the box. I'm sure I can pay lots more and get better quality and speed, but for what I need it (e-mail, scanning into PrintShop, etc) this really fit the bill. Bottom line - I highly recommend this scanner for those with a low budget that don't need truly professional quality.

I PURCHASED THE VISIONEER 6100 AND LOVE IT. I WANTED A SCANNER WITH EXCELLENT QUALITY AT A LOW PRICE. I DID! THIS SCANNER IS FAST WITH EXCELLENT QUALITY AND GREAT SOFTWARE! I RECOMEND THIS SCANNER FOR EVERYONE LOOKING FOR A LOW COST SCANNER WITH EXCELLENT QUALITY AND GTEAT SOFTWARE. ALSO I READ THAT THE LIGHT ALWAYS STAYS ON. THIS IS NOT TRUE. THERE ARE DRIVERS AVALIBLE TO TURN THE LIGHT OFF. MY LIGHT NEVER STAYED ON AND IT WAS INSTALLED OUT OF THE BOX. THE LIGHT PROBLEM MAY EXIST ON WIN95 NOT 98.

I bought the Epson 3200 Photo scanner and had problems with spotting of images scanned in the upper right hand corner of the scanning bed. After exchanging the first unit, I had the same problem with the replacement, which I returned for a refund. I would not recommend this model scanner to anyone. Shop elsewhere.

The scanner does a good job on both transparencies and negatives using the included carriers and is a relatively affordable way to digitize those older negatives and slides. The Silverfast software included is quite difficult to use, with meager, unclear documentation. Even purchasing the Taz Tally book may not be helpful, as it too is complicated and incomplete. The Epson software included with the scanner is simpler to use and gives adequate results, especially when scanning into Photoshop.

Given the choice between the standard 3200 or the pro version with the Silverfast AI software, I would now choose the standard version. The savings can be better spent elsewhere.

I've had several scanners over the years but this is the best one yet. I found it particularly good on a wide variety of photo formats, especially negatives of all common sizes. I agree with others that the Silverfast software is difficult to master but it does pretty good job after learning its quirks. Also, you print out a multipage guide on how to use Silverfast and visit their web site for online tutorials.

When I first bought this scanner, I thought it was one of the best for the money. The scans were fairly quick till you scanned at 300 dpi and more. It was easy to install, and the software was based for an intermediate user. A few bells and whisiles. But four months after using the scanner, It started to slow down, and eventually went from one scan every 40 sec. to one scan every 15 minutes. HP was no help, they led me to correct the problem that did nothing but cause conflicts and lock-ups. Not to mention there are no drivers to be found for the 6200 series scanners. So just please be careful. I suggest you don't buy this scanner at all.

Having had SCSI problems in the past, I vowed never again to confront this monster.

Enter USB. So far everthing that I have connected to my Dell P2 450mh functions as hoped for (2 HP Scanners & 1 Sony CD-ROM burner).

If you don't have a USB port, then it is to your benefit and sanity to upgrade if you can.

I purchased the 6250Cxi as a backup scanner for the Agfa DuoScan I currently own. Upon opening the package, I was impressed with the software and components included. SCSI setup was a breeze, and I recommend having a very good SCSI adapter (I have an Adaptec 2640UI ~$299) if you want to use this scanner to the best of its ability. In addition, I tried the USB features, and like the SCSI, there were no problems. The software packages are great, and unlike HP's previous attempts at TWAIN interfaces, this scanner interfaces well with Photoshop, QuarkXPress, InDesign and Illustrator, the programs I rely on most often. If you are a graphic enthusiast, or someone who is looking for a scanner that is one step above the rest (under $400), consider this one or it's less-equipped (no feeder) brother, the 6200C. If, however, you require a scanner that does slides, I'd recommend an Agfa DuoScan with a slide tray. The 6250's prism adapter is good, but not worthy of too much praise.

It's incredibly slow (and NOT because it's scanning at a high resolution - it takes years just to get the software to launch in the first place), insanely loud, and doesn't produce great results. It was issued to me at work - if I'd bought it myself, I'd have returned it immediately.

It scans normal pictures beautifully and quicker than my old scanner. The buttons are convenient and easy to use, as is the included software. My only two gripes are that the scanner glass had a few white flecks on the INSIDE of the glass (and no way to clean them off), and the fact that images scanned with the film scanner look faded and overexposed.

Super good quality, easy to setup and great software included. Great for anything from OCR to copying your pictures at high resolution.

I bought this scanner 6 months ago to replace a .. scanner that just wore out. After scanning one picture the computer lost the scanner. I would reinstall, scan one picture and lose it. The tech support was worthless they told me to unplug my other USB stuff, then they told me to reinstall the software, which was tough. No change. I bought a new computer with XP pre-loaded this machine cannot find the scanner. What a hunk of junk!

Most of the bad reviews I have read sound like software issues. If you can wait it out and get it to work out, you'll be very pleased with this scanner. The 4-up scanning saves time, the preview is fast, the one touch buttons are great, the quality is as good as scanners twice the price and the software is decent as well. Really, for the price, you know you can't beat it! I have had mine for a year now and love it. I am picky and demanding too. It has served me well through two versions of WIN98 and now with XP. I want the best for my money, and this is it!

I have had this scanner for about a year now, and it has proven reliable and steadfast. The images produced were true to color, and the machine works very fast. The product could use a better manual, though. Still, I like the scanner very much because of its image quality, price, and versatility. Versatility here is related to its ability to scan multiple pictures at the same time. And for the price, which I believe is at least a couple of hundred bucks lower than other brands of the same scanning power and quality, I believe Microtek 5600 is hard to beat.

About 6 months after buying the S450, I started getting paper jams from hell. I called Customer Service and they replaced it with a refurbished model. 4 months later the same problem has surfaced. It wastes ink like crazy and the so called economical ink tanks cost a fortune since I was reprinting pages because of the very frequent paper jams. I never had this problem with my HP Deskjet which I owned for 4-5 years!!!

I upgraded and added a scanner in one fell swoop with this cheap and easy set-up. Cannon rocks!

At first I was concerned about the printer and scanner, and wan't sure whether it came with all the cables and ink cartridges. I was surprized to find everything was together and everything was included. The S450 printer prints extremely fast, is easy to set up, and last a long time. The scanner is equally as efficent, as photos are exact images. This is a wonderful product.

I wasted no time returning this scanner. I have eventually settled on a Microtek 4600. The Epson is sleek appearing, lightweight, fast. But fast is no good when the results are unuseable. The Epson software doesn't permit you to preset what you want to scan and whether or not to push more light to it, or less. It defaults to amateur settings and the results might thrill someone who's never used a scanner before, but anyone who has used one for graphics work of any kind, will find it unworthy. The factory is impossible to get hold of either through email, or telephone. In essence the software is lousy and the support is nil. Back it went.

This scanner is an excellent purchase for an ad agency or design house looking to improve their color. Right out of the box, this scanner has excellent color reproduction, and the 3.6 DMax grabs excellent detail in the shadows. Our agency... has a client roster of many large agribusiness firms, and this scanner grabs onto individual hairs in even the blackest Black Angus cattle.

The Epson TWAIN software handles USM and de-screening like some of the higher-end scanners, but it lacks precise controls for those features.

Batch scanning is one of the strengths of this scanner, with multiple marquee selection as easy as click and drag, and one-button batch scanning.

This scanner offers one-button capture(Windows only), network scanning and an Automatic Document Feeder option, but we have not explored those options in our workflow.

I think this is a fabulous scanner. I'm the curator for a photographic website ...and I've run over 4000 11"x14" photographs through mine with no problems. I use ULead's PhotoImpact 6 for image processing (TIF to JPG) - it's the only program that allows macros - when you're doing 4000 scans with several manual steps the macros are indispensible. I can't say I'm looking forward to scanning the next 4000 photos, but I sure know this scanner can do the job.

At 400 dpi it is fast (40 seconds for 14-bit greyscale 11"x14" scan) and very quiet. I added a SCSI hard drive to get the 50 MB TIF files to save to disk on my NT system in 2 seconds.

The sample size (14-bit B&W or 42-bit Color), resolution and Dmax are unmatched until you spend over $10,000.

Add the Epson 1280 printer for the best photo output.

This is a fairly decent scanner with some useful features and a few quirks. The first scanner that I received was faulty. By a diligently searching the Web and then fighting the HP automated phone system, I managed to get through to HP technical support without having to pay (you've got to lie to the system until you find an option that lets you through to a person because if you tell the automated system you're calling about this machine, they will tell you that you have to pay to talk to tech support). After being put on hold for an hour, I finally got to talk to a person in India who asked me to describe the problem. It wasn't until I got the machine to make its horrible grinding noises that the tech support person could hear all the way over there in India that she agreed there really was a problem. 10 days later, I had a free replacement arrive from HP. In reading other reviews for this scanner, I can see that I wasn't the only one who received a faulty machine the first time around. I'm not sure whether this is due to a bad inspection team at HP or that the machines do not stand up to the rigors of shipping very well. In any case, if you need a working machine in a hurry, this might not be the best choice.

My new working model does most of what I needed it for. It has an array of buttons on the front that allow you to do a quick scan, send to the Web, e-mail, and photocopy, and a few other buttons whose purposes I haven't deduced yet. (The scanner came with a quick-start card and software, but no manual.) The software included a limited version of Corel Print Office (without templates)- -like Microsoft Publisher, E-Fax messenger Plus, HP Photo Smart (for organizing photographs), and HP PrecisionScan. No OCR software was included. The software installed satisfactorily on my aging IBM 600 Laptop running Windows 2000. Of these software packages, the only one I actually use is the HP PrecisionScan.

Black and white text images scan with acceptable, but not great quality. I used the photocopy button on the scanner to photocopy some pages from a book, and a handy copy machine interface appeared on my monitor, where I could select the number of copies, the quality of the print, and adjust the contrast. With the text and photo setting selected, the page came out printed gray, so I had to choose the text-only setting. With the text-only setting and high quality printing selected, the background text was white, but the letters of the text were still rather pixilated when the copies came off the printer. In a pinch, I could use this scanner for photocopying, but this wouldn't be my tool of choice to get the job done well.

One of the main reasons I selected this scanner was that I needed an affordable way to scan in photographic slides for my Website and PowerPoint shows. This scanner comes with an ATA device with a backlight for scanning slides and negatives. The plug for the ATA device is on the back of the machine, and it's a real trick to get it in. I found myself standing the scanner on end vertically and fighting with the plug, praying all the while that I didn't break something inside the machine while I struggled. But in the end, I got the ATA plug in, and vowed never to unplug it. Which is a pain, because then you need to find a place to store the ATA device within a short distance of the scanner, but not on the glass because its funny shape will dent the scanner lid. When I finally got the ATA working, I found the scanning quality once again to be acceptable, but not great. After scanning a slide, I almost always have to adjust the color in my photo editing software, usually bringing down the blues and playing up the reds. I had better luck with the old non-electrical plastic reflective slide scanning pyramids that HP used to give away. I wish you could purchase them somewhere- -I've found directions for making them out of paper on the web, but the plastic ones worked at least as well as the expensive ATA device.

I've also tried scanning some negatives using the ATA device. Ugh! I tried scanning them in negative mode with the PrecisionScan software, and they came out dark with no reds at all. With a lot of brightening, the image was generally recognizable, but not aesthetic. I also tried scanning negatives in slide mode and then reversing the colors in my photo editing software, with virtually identically results- -dark with no reds. By changing the scans to gray scale and lightening them a lot, the images could almost be made acceptable, but not quite.

So, if you're looking for a scanner that produces acceptable, but not great, scans from text or slides, and you already have your own OCR software and you don't need to scan negatives, then this scanner might do the job. But buy it well before your deadline in case you get a bad one and need to return it.

I was looking at film scanners before happening upon this unit. I was torn between the ability to scan pictures and the desire to scan negatives, but felt that I didn't have to compromise with this scanner! At 2400dpi (the same res as a film scanner) I figured I would be getting the best of all worlds, but you know the old saying, "If it looks to good to be true..."

Here is the bottom line, this is a great scanner for documents and photos. In fact, scanning a 4x6 photo produces excellent results... better than scanning the corresponding negative. How is this you ask? I would like to know the answer as well. As far as I can tell I could not get HP Precisionscan Pro to get what I'd call a decent scan on a negative. Theoretically a 2400dpi optical scan would give me about a 3200x2300 pixel image. At 48 bit color, one could imagine the detail. Well keep imagining. As I mentioned the best I could get was the same scan quality of a 4x6 print and even that was questionable. I sent an e-mail to HP support and have had no response for 4 days now. I'd like to give HP the benefit of the doubt, but if I can't get answers, I'm sure I can find anther scanner at 1/2 the price to do photos and documents just as well, even if it is the 4470.

This product was first shipped with styrofoam residue on the INSIDE of the case... this caused spots on all of my pictures.

But Amazon was very quick at replacing the defective product. On second try, I found the 2400x2400 dpi resolution to be so much more than was necessary that I was shocked. My experience with inferior products worried me about buying anything less. At 2400, you could probably make highway billboard posters without any added granualarity!

As for speed, the scanning rate is very quick for 400dpi and less. The software included on the CD-ROm facilitates productive work. Perhaps the biggest surprise for me was how powerful, precise and quick the photo negative/slide scanner is! This feature kept me from returning it. It, too has nice editing tools in the software and integrates well with Adobe products.

If I were to buy over again, I would downgrade to the 4400 series.

The software is horrible. It wasn't obvious how the files were saved and for reasons known only to the manufacture there didn't seem to be a way to name the file. Very strange. I returned the scanner immediately.

I bought this to go with my brandnew Pentium 3 processor, only to find out that the software included is incompatable with Windows Me. The update is on their website, I just don't have DSL or Cable, so i can't download it fast enough before I lose my connection.

I saw the Astra Net e3420 in a local electronics store on sale...so I couldn't pass it up. So far I haven't been disappointed one bit. It has USB connectivity, 42-bit color, and 600 X 1200 dpi. For the price, and the fact that I am just using it for personal use, it is an extemely great buy. However, I am running a 1ghz machine, so my performance may vary from yours, but the scans come through faster than I expected. This also depends on the dpi you are scanning at. As for the software that came with it, I don't know what the other guy is talking about. I used the included software (Vista Scan) to scan the photos. The software puts the scanned images into the vstascan/image directory by default, but you can change this to point to wherever you want. From there I use Adobe Photoshop (not included) to edit my photos or add effects to them. As for operating system compatibility, I am running Windows 2000, and there are absolutley zero problems. I hope you find this helpful. Keep in mind that I have rated 5 stars for the scanners price...ease of use, scan quality, and the fact that I have yet to encounter a problem with it. Happy scanning :)

This is a good scanner if you have Win9x, but it will not run under XP!! There are no drivers for XP for this scanner. If you have XP get the 2400U instead!

I would just like to say, For a basic scanner it is pretty good and easy to use. But mine permantately broke after only a year and half of infrequent use! and the company basically told me it cannot be fixed..and might as well just throw it away. Thought this might help someone who needs a more durable and longer lasting product.

This is an awesome scanner It can do so much. it can alsomst scan anything. The software that comes with it is the best part. So easy to use anybody caan use it. You should get one!