A few good points but a disappointment overall (long)
Written: Jan 08 '04
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Product Rating:
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Pros: fairly fast
Cons: autofeeder fails often, spotty software, missing features
The Bottom Line: Both software and hardware would have benefited from another design cycle.
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| dmitryjoy's Full Review: Hewlett Packard Scanjet 5530 Photomaster Flatbed S... |
HP scanjet 5530 review:
First a word on my background: I am an electronics engineer who’s old enough to have a warm spot in my heart for Hewlett Packard’s name. In my mind this name has always stood for quality in design and usability. I am also a fairly experienced semi-pro photographer with about 20 years of printing my own negatives. I do software engineering for a living.
I bought the 5530 scanner for about $250 at a local CompUSA to primarily scan old pictures for family files. I will be taking it back. Here’s why:
Good points:
1. The scanner is fast with fairly good color representation
(By the way, the first reviewer is wrong about having to reset the size of each picture when autofeeding them. After RTFM, I figured out how to scan unattended -- you have to turn off preview when using autofeeder)
Minor issues:
1. The scanner is noisy. No big deal, of course, but the autofeeder’s fan is loud enough to make it hard to think near it :-)
2. The scanner reverses the order of pictures as it’s scanning them. Of course, one can learn to live with it, but would you accept a photocopier that reverses the orders of originals? Would Bill Hewlett?
3. Will not autofeed anything larger than 4x6.
More serious issues:
(Keeping in mind that the autofeeder will be the main reason to purchase this scanner)
1. Autofeeder is definitely the weak link. It lacks any grooves or guides for the photograph, instead relying on the vacuum suction to a set of rubber bands-on-rollers. This may work in a copier (light, textured paper) but fails with numbing regularity with photographs (heavier, glossy stock).
1a. It will often fail to feed the print. Fuji glossy paper is a lost cause. Kodak satin is best. Agfa glossy is pretty bad as well. The autofeeder detects a misfeed mostly during the outfeed cycle but will still insist on taking its sweet time to save the crooked scan which potentially screws up image numbering – see below.
1b. It will often fail to detect that a print was misfed by 2-3 degrees, producing a crooked scan with the feeder’s mechanism on the background.
1c. Scanning small photos (smaller than 3x5) sometimes confuses the picture-extents-determination software, treating you once again to a scan of the feeder mechanism.
1d. What I find most touching about the feeder jams is the advice to look up “jam” in the help system. Go ahead, try it. It ain’t there.
1e. Autofeeder will not feed pictures with scalloped edged (e.g. old photographs).
2. Software is VERY spotty
2a. I believe that there is no way to tell the scanner to use a pattern for filenames: e.g. ItalyScanXXXX.jpg. It will always write scanxxxx.jpg.
2b. I can’t find a way to make it start the sequence at a different number.
2c. If you change filenames or copy files out the directory that the scanner is scanning into, the software will place the next file into the created “hole”. E.g. say you have scan0001 through scan0099 in the directory. Then you move or rename scan10. The next scanned image will be called scan10, then one after that scan0100. This is pure madness. This, combined with scanner’s propensity to misfeed, makes for a very messy ordering problem.
2d. When selecting multiple images for rotation or deletion, the software will occasionally lose relationship between the thumbnail and “reality”. This should never ever happen. The QA department at HP gets another black mark.
2e. There is no scratch/dust removal feature. This is precisely the feature that the scanner SHOULD have, because it’s much harder to do so in Photoshop once the image is saved in jpeg (which is what one normally does due to file sizes). In an uncompressed image, dust particles are small dots –easy to find and fix. In a jpeg image, they are little blobs – much harder. The software is full of features it SHOULD NOT have – color adjustment, rescaling, resizing, sharpening… all the miscellany that HP, with all due respect, doesn’t have a clue about; e.g. the software can’t read screen or printer profiles and doesn’t support color space conversions, white point selection, gamma correction, etc. This is why I have Photoshop. I don’t need HP’s helping hand. I wasted 30 scans before I realized that HP insists of sharpening images by default. (Hint: It’s not any good at it)
3. Negative/slide scanning.
I realize this is not a $15K drum scanner. But HP does provide a film strip scanner attachment, so they are fair game. I haven’t tried scanning slides, but
3a There is no way to specify what type of film one is scanning. Color response curves are non-existent.
3b B/W negative scanning… I just can’t figure it out. There’s nothing in the manual about it and the output files look quantized. Could be operator error, but I doubt it. Try scanning “slides” with “colors inverted”…
3c There is no way to specify “No interpolation, just give me the pixels you measured”.
3d. Film scanner attachment sits in a hard plastic frame on top of the glass. This provides ample opportunity to 1) scratch the glass and 2) trap all kinds of dust.
4. Accuracy.
I scanned a few pigment chips several times. The dark cyan chip did not come out anywhere near 8-bit consistent (more like 6.5), not to mention the touted 12 bits. The light orange chip isn’t much better. In normal image scanning this shouldn’t make too much difference however – very few photo papers (and printing processes) are capable of true 256 level consistency. Still, the HP marketing department needs a little education on the differences between precision and accuracy.
Conclusion:
Buy this scanner if you have a large collection of new-ish 3x5 or 4x6 photos that you need backed up. Specially if they are printed on satin Kodak paper. Otherwise, read the warning above and think twice.
To me, this product feels like a beta release – another disappointment from a company I used to trust.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 250
Interface: USB
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Epinions.com ID:
dmitryjoy
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Reviews written: 2
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