The HP 3400 is a brilliant machine with great scan quality, good aesthetics and a very attractive price tag. I guess the scanner being a part of a normal SOHO household was pioneered by HP with it’s innovative easy to use technology and affordable pricing and reliability.
Well let’s not shower adulations upon HP and let’s get into the serious business of appraising the 3400 without further ado. The 3400 is ano frills true colour A4 flatbed scanner which is a dream to use.
The optical resolution is pretty much acceptable at 600X1200 dpi at 36bit color (with an enhanced H/W resolution of 9600 dpi). For a low-end scanner to achieve such resolutions implies that it has to compromise on speed. The 3400 falters on this front with a looooong 2.5 min scan time. In any case, the 3400 is not meant for the professional user.
The 3400 ia available in parallel and USB variants and it’s always advisable to opt for the latter as it dramatically improves performance and scan speeds. The bundled software sure leaves a lot to be desired and apart from the Precision Scan LT, the rest of the stuff which comes along with the installation CD is pretty much useless. The OCR software is mediocre and I would recommend a 3rd party OCR software like Corel for character recognition jobs. The image editing utility, though easy to use lacks on features, but then considering it’s free, it’s sufficient for simple image manupulation and enhancement.
The 3400 however does not compromise on image quality. Images and colours are crisp ’n clear and there are no visible traces of any blurring at the edges. Let us attempt to be unbiased. Photographs scanned on the 3400 still do not come close to 35mm film resolution; but then thats the job of high end scanners like the HP6400 and other drum scanners.
There are no compatibilty problems with Windows2000 auto detecting the 3400. It performs consistently across various flavours of Windows (excepting NT); even though there are no dedicated drivers for Win2K or WinME. If you’re a linux user you have no choice but to settle for another scanner.
The 3400 is ideal for web development, emailing documents/pics and simple DTP jobs, what with it’s maintanance free design and it’s incredibly easy to use. HP is legendary in terms of reliability and after sales service with updates and patches being freely available on the Hp site. If speed is a criteria, kindly do abstain from the 3400 and opt for it’s 6 series siblings instead.
The 3400 in my humble opinion is one of the best low end I have come across (the UMAX astra comes a close 2nd). If you’re looking for quality and pricing and are willing to forgo the speed factor, the 3400 is the way to go.