I purchased this scanner a long time ago when it first came out for five hundred dollars. Little did I know the price would drop shortly afterwards. The price of the scanner now is 300 dollars and its a good buy.
Quality
This scanner provides fabulous quality pictures. It has:
Max H-Optical Resolution: 600
Max V-Optical Resolution: 600
The better the quality the larger the image file. Also you can save the image as different type of extensions, such as jpg, gif, tif, bmp...
I bought a compatible HP printer for my digital camera but it does the job phenomenally. My mother is always asking me to scan family photo’s so she can cut then and put them in her office because she doesn’t want to cut the original. With this scanner you scan the photo’s crop them and edit them to the desired size without messing up the pixels. After I printed them and gave them to her she put them in her office and people always thought they were the original photo’s until she told them it was just a scanned photo.
Speed
I don’t know the exact speed of this machine I would estimate 2 photo’s a minute or that’s what it seems like. It seems quite slow but the quality that it produces is worth it. There are different type of settings that can alter the speed such as if you want black and white, color, or if it’s a text. Like all scanners this scanner is a manual feed and you can scan up to a illegal size document.
Setup & Usage
This scanner is easy to set up and user friendly. You can either plug it into a parallel port or a USB port both are compatible. Then you just pop in the CD they give you and click on install everything is straight forward. If you set it up to your parallel port and you have a printer also, no problem you can just set up your printer port into the back of the scanner and they will both work. It has a flatbed so your images should appear as they look.
Flaws
Sometime when I scan a text file, I hate the way it scans because it changes the options automatically to best suit the document. So when I scan a text file it creates regions of which part of the document you want to show, to fix this simple select, ’’select entire page.’’ Another flaw that I found with this scanner is that sometimes you choose to scan a color photo and it appears black and white. Make sure that you have your settings right in properties.
Final Thoughts ....
Overall, this is a great scanner and I would recommend it more to people who wish to scan pictures either for a website or to print off. This is because it produces great quality, compared to many other scanners. If your sole purpose of a scanner is for university purposes I would suggest a cheaper scanner, yet this one can’t hurt and will come in handy on projects and posters.