Scanner Reviews

My scans come out crooked. If I align it at the top the whole thing has to be rotated. If I align it with a side, then it's off center. This is very frustrating and I will return it. The scans came out decent but very dark. I had to lighten them tremendously.

Overall a decent scanner. You'll have to do adjustments to your scans with any scanner. The transparency adapter is pretty good, too. I've had some problems scanning negatives. You have to check with microtek to see where it is available. There were some problems installing the scanner with XP, but i got it to work. They might have even of improved the drivers since then.

If you have a laptop, you can probably transfer data to it via its onboard Ir (infrared) port. If you have a PC, and most do not have Ir ports, this Ir adapter will work, *IF* you have a serial port to spare. Most of us do not have an unused serial port, so such devices require swapping and rebooting. New to the market are USB IrDA adapters. These work well out of the box and require no swapping or rebooting. The price is a bit higher for now, but I think it's worth it for the increased ease of use.

We just got a 4570c at my work, and I have to say, I'm a bit disappointed. The flatbed scanning seems to be fine for black and white line art and color photos, but I've been using the slide attachment with 35mm slides, and it really doesn't impress me. It looks to me like an actual focus problem. If I zoom in on the highest optical resolution (2400dpi), to 1:1, I am not close enough to see the pixels, but I completely lose detail like grass blades and tire treads that are easily visible with a loupe on the slide. Scanning these slides at 600dpi was essentially as good as 2400dpi. I don't think that's reasonable. As a flatbed, it works nice. The color is good and the resolution is excellent. Actually I just tried an experiment. I took the slide out of the slide adapter and taped it to the bottom face of the adapter, so that the film is as close to the scanner glass as possible. That made a noticeable resolution improvement! So it looks like dropping the film 0.065 inch closer to the glass makes a difference in focus! I'll have to try a UMAX or Microtek that have the backlight built into the lid. I have also had a lot of trouble with the HP picture manager software. It had lots of trouble finding directories on my C drive, in Win 2000 Pro. I switched to Presto PageManager and all those problems went away. To sum up, the 4570c is a well-built, good quality flatbed scanner, but the slide/negative adapter isn't worth much, and the software seems to be flakey. I guess it's possible that these problems are fixed in the 4570cxi, but I doubt it.

The title is HP SCANJET 4600 ( Q3121A#ABA )
<- A HP Scanjet 4600 (without anymore words) is a see through flat scanner (without transparency adapter). The price of less than $50 is entirely too low to be for real. In small print at the "friendlysolutions" listing there is the following:

(...)REAL TIME availability - highly recommended before placing an order. hp scanjet transparent materials adapter "

Note the last word, "Adapter"... apparently this is the adapter that comes with the Scanjet 4670 or can be purchased separately as the "HP Scanjet 4600 transparent materials adapter." The merchant does list the model number beside the name of the scanner but who would know that is an adapter.

If you are looking for the see-through scanner look elsewhere.

The title of the review says it all.

Do NOT get this scanner. Get the Minolta Dimage Scan Elite for a little more with Digital Ice. I did quite a bit of research before deciding on this scanner, so I'll sum up for you what took me many hours. I also considered a couple of the lower end Minolta Dimage scanners, as well as the Nikon Coolscan and the HP Photosmart S20.

Essentially, they all promise to scan 35mm film, and with an adapter, it can also do APS. However, promises are just that - empty for most of these scanners.

This one is OK if you dont mind some bad scans b/c of no Digital Ice. If you spend another $100 you can get the Scan Elite which has the Digital Ice. A MUST have.

I use XP Pro and it does not recognize the X63 each time I reboot. Most of the time I have to reinstall to print. Great printer but compatibility problem with XP.

If you can handle the toner costs, this units works well as a copier and it's very impressive at copying photographs. Sharp puts the same workings into a slightly different case and sells it to Xerox where it is retagged as a workcentre. We've had this Xerox unit at work and it has been great as a copier but we had to remove it from printer duty because it was always locking up and printing solid black pages whenever we asked it to print documents over about 3 pages long. I bought the Sharp for my home hoping the problem was fixed. Long story made short: It wasn't. I took it back and got a Brother that produces quality that is about the same but it prints faster and doesn't lock up.

The 785 is the same inside as the Uniden 250D -- except it is a tabletop receiver versus being portable as the 250D is.

Like the 250D, you'll need to purchase a digital decoder card if you wish to get any digital signals. The card is inserted into a slot in the back of the scanner. The price of the card is roughly equivalent to the price of the scanner itself -- so be sure you plan for that expenditure.

I've only got one beef with the 785D and that is the birdy (a channel in a scanner that receives nothing but loud static due to internal circuitry). All scanners have these birdies. Unfortunately the Uniden 785's is smack in the middle of the frequency bank for Troop H in Hartford CT.

Other than the birdy issue (which you can overcome by hitting the scan button when it locks onto the static) I enjoy this scanner a lot. The one thing you'll definitely want to do is purchase software to program it. Your fingers will get tired VERY quickly of keying in the data and alpha tags for every frequency. There are a couple good choices for software and the unit itself only requires a serial connecter cable (readily available at Radio Shack).

If I had one more wish it would be for the scanner to allow for monitoring of priority channels while trunking. As it stands the priority feature is only active when you are scanning conventional (non trunked) channels.

Overall this is THE scanner to get if you are serious about listening to your local public safety frequencies.

I think everyone gave this poor little printer a bad rap. Most said their printer died after 2 years. What do you want for seventy bucks? I run my printer like a banshee. Between my daughter printing out her graphics and me printing out high-quality professional looking business brochures I'm lucky this thing has lasted this long (going on 3 years). PLUS, in all this time I have only had to replace the print head once. I buy ink from ebay @ 1.50 for black and 3.00 for color - can't beat that. The quality is great. My only complaint is the speed. When printing at the highest quality level it's a snail but the quality is awsome.

08Aug99 I have owned my BJC-2000 printer for 3 weeks and remain quite happy with it. One of the accessories that comes with the printer that is not mentioned in the write-up is a cool little case designed to hold the ink cartridge and keep it from drying out while you are using one of the 4 optional print heads. The print head fits perfectly into the case and is compressed against a seal in the bottom when the lid is closed and squeezed down until it latches.

The picture quality is very good for such a budget printer. I purchased mine primarily for text printing and am using the BC-20 black print head which has a very large tank (good for aprox. 900 pages of text) compared to the much smaller tank of black ink (good for aprox. 225 pages of text) that is on the BC-21e color print head that is included with the printer. The BC-20 prints black text faster than the color head as it has 128 nozzles for black compared to 64 black nozzles on the BC-21e. The color head has replacable color and black tanks which are cheaper to replace than buying the entire print head. The print head is very easy to replace. It just drops into a slot and a lever is pulled forward to lock it into the holder.

When I purchased my printer Canon had a $30 rebate program that you might want to look into.

I bought this back in '99 with my webtv (which is now msntv). Once I got a computer I discovered I wanted a better printer. I never had a printer before so I have nothing to compare it to.

It lasted me for 3 years. It made a little noise, took about a minute to warm up, and a few seconds to touch the paper cause the ink can slighly smear. The ink tanks (which have 2, 1 for black and 1 for color) take awhile to empty with minimal use. The black is cheap, like 10 bucks, but the color is like 30 bucks. The 2 ink tanks come with the printer but the cable doesn't.

The main problem with me was the disc that came with it. The software isn't up to date with what's on computers now. So I caught hell with trying to install it.

This is great for college or simple printing.

Worked great out of the box and for the first few months, and then it stopped working. Period. Just gave me an error message telling me to call tech support when I'd try to scan. After several emails failed to solve the problem (Reply #1: Try unplugging it and plugging back in. Response #1: Nope. Didn't fix it. Reply #2. Turn it off. Unplug all the cables from it. Wait 5 minutes. Reconnect cables. Response #2: Nope, still broken. Reply #3: Try unplugging it and ...) I gave up and tried live chat. And, they replaced it. Their dime to ship it. Even though it was a gift and I had no receipt. Great service, I thought.
So, fast forward a few months and the new one stopped working. Big white stripe down each scan like there's a burnt out pixel or something. So, I emailed tech support. They have clearly reduced the skill level of their tech support. The number of emails I have traded has been ridiculous. The last one ended with the tech saying he didn't think there was warranty coverage. Frustrated, I tried live chat. After a painfully slow chat (think 15 minutes per response), the guy told me to call their toll-free number. That was it.
I'm pretty upset here. Upset enough to spend an afternoon at CompUSA trying to dissuade people from buying HP products. Amazing how quickly their tech support went from world-class to being a factor which will dissuade me from buying their stuff again.

I bought this scanner pretty much just for the automatic feeder. Based on earlier reviews I read, i was half expecting to return it. I was amazed at the image quality it gave from 4X6 prints. I had a few jams, but they weren't too common. HP tells you not to scan a picture more than 5 times using the automatic photo feeder, and I can see why. If you look at glossy photos under the light after feeding them through once, you can see some damage. But the biggest problem I had with the scanner was that when the scanner scans through a stack of pictures, it will scan every picture and once all are scanned, then it sends them to the computer. Frequently, I would scan a stack at 600 dpi, and at 600 dpi it takes a considerable amount of time, the scanning program would mess up in the middle of the transfer, and you'd have to rescan half of the stack. the HP website didn't have any patches or troubleshooting to solve this particular problem. I ended up just keeping the stack size small, finishing my pictures, then returning the scanner. I have windows ME, which isn't the most reliable, so you might be ok with another operating system.

So in my experience, you still save time scanning pictures, even with the occasional transfer mess ups, and while the photo feeder damages the pictures, all the handling of transferring pictures to and from a regular scanner could amount to damage too if you're not careful.

This scanner is definitely worth taking a look at, but if you have problems, don't be afraid to return it

I fully expected to have to return the scanner after reading all those bad reviews. But I'm glad I took the risk to buy it!! After scanning several hundred old photos(they can be any size between 3-by-5-inches and 4-by-6-inches as long as each bunch is the same size), I am extremely pleased. There were maybe one or two minor jams - no problem. Also, I can't see any marks on my originals, and the automatic cropping is a big convenience as well. I have WinXP with 512 MB of RAM.

My only complaint concerns the software. HP tries to guess what you want to do. After scanning, it is set up to collect your group of photos into a separate folder every month, which is located in My Pictures. So if you bulk-scan several groups of pix that should go into the same folder on your Desktop, you run into problems. The numbering starts over with each scanned group, so you can't just add a new group of images to the last one because they will have the same numbers. (Maybe there's a way to change that, but who wants to wade through all the help files.)

This scanner is a great invention, and much needed to deal with those shoe boxes full of old photos. Maybe HP listened to all the complaints and improved their product!

The included Funhouse program is very nice too.