While surfing RFD forums, I saw a deal for a scanner. I had been half-heartedly paying attention to Craigslist for a used scanner, and typically they were being sold for about $30; so $50 w/ free shipping for a new HP ScanJet 4370 seemed like a decent deal, and I bought ordered one on Thursday. It arrived on Monday, which apparently in HP-talk is 7-10 days later.

I had always kind of wanted a scanner, but it wasn’t really high on my list of things to buy; specifically because it takes up so much damn room. It fell further down my to-buy list ever since I moved to digital cameras, although I still had a lot of (literally) buried old photos I wanted to digitize.

The 4370 had a couple of things going for it. First it had the ability to scan film negatives/slides and it was a CCD, which while thicker, could scan at supposedly higher resolution than CMOS scanners. But after playing around with it for awhile, there are also a lot of drawbacks:

  • The software (“driver”?) is enormous. Even on a minimum install, it required 250mb and forced the installation of the HP Solutions Center.
  • It is noisy as hell, like a chain saw operating in my room.
  • The software defaults to settings that will “enhance” your scanned photo by fixing up the color and etc, however I can’t default the settings to an unmodified version.
  • The worst, is that the scanned result is not sharp. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by dSLR photos, but then how do comic book or magazine scanners get their images to be so sharp? (although I bet they don’t use $50 scanners.)

So, I’m not particularly impressed by my purchase, but $50 isn’t a lot of money to waste. Although, I figured out that it was original targeted for Latin America (the instructions were not primarily english), probably didn’t sell well, and was then liquidated to the rest of the world.

No related posts.


Posted by in Blogs Tags: , ,