ScanJet 5470Cse - Just renaming the ScanJet 5470C
Written: Jan 29 '02 (Updated Jan 30 '02)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Ease of Use: |
 |
|
|
Pros: excellent quality, fast, ease of use/user friendliness
Cons: cost, transparency adapter weak, large footprint, letter sized scan area
The Bottom Line: An excellent scanner overall but still a bit pricey for most users. You get the quality of HP's high-end ScanJet 7400 with a few compromises.
|
|
|
| yusakugo's Full Review: Hewlett Packard ScanJet 5470Cse Flatbed Scanner |
The ScanJet 5470Cse is the next generation of HP ScanJet 5000 series scanners. Actually, the 5470Cse is the current description for the 5470C ScanJet model. The 5470Cse is the same scanner as the 5470C with slight changes in the software for a home/home office crowd. However, the 5470C isn't listed on HP's web site any longer being replaced with the 5470Cse. The following review for the 5470Cse and the 5470C have many similarities since they are the same base scanner!(The program bundle is slightly different). Note that there is also a 5470Cxi model intended for the business crowd (HP has used this naming scheme for years with many of its ScanJet models as well as for its DeskJet line!) that has a slightly different software bundle. The Cxi is supposedly the business version of the 5470C ScanJet.
As I stated in the 5470C review, it is replacing the slightly more than a year old 5370C scanner and is quite a bit different than the 5400C scanner. The 5470Cse has been revamped and made more powerful using technology from the 7400 line of ScanJets.
The basics of the unit seems to be based on the 7400C scanning engine to some degree. Quality wise, scans from these two units seemed to be completely on par with each other including the weaknesses of both scanners. The ScanJet 5490 C/Cxi/Cse adds the automatic document feeder. The 5470 is the top of the line for HP's home and home office scanners although the 7400 series ScanJets are technically HP true top of the line scanners (at least price wise!).
Specs, Details, and Weaknesses...
The 5470 maintains the a sleeker design than most of the ScanJet models, which was HP's trend for the 5000 series line over the past few years. The design of the unit is more rounded than 7400 unit. The scanner's dimensions are 13W x 22.5D x 4.1H in inches making this a large and bulky scanner although not nearly as bulky as the 7400 series ScanJets. However, the actual scan area is limited to 8.5 x 11 inches (i.e. letter sized paper). The scanner is a whopping 8.8 lbs! There are a ton of buttons on the front panel with a 16 character LCD which can give you many bits of useful information... I'll go into that later. Overall, the unit is more pleasant to look at than other current ScanJet scanners although definitely not as nice looking as Canon's CanoScan line.
Using the technology developed with the ScanJet 7400 series scanners, the 5470C ability to scan at 2400dpi results from the use of a CCD with 2 1200dpi sensors spaced half a pixel from each other... resulting in what the industry considers 2400dpi. Note that many companies use this trick, including the high quality Epson scanners! Like the 7400, HP added a 600dpi CCD to the dual 1200dpi CCD just like the 7400. This allows the 5470C to make quick and easy preview scans as well as excellent and quick low end scans. There have been improvements however... the 5470 seems to be faster than the 7400 by a few seconds. Now theoretically, you have a scanner that can easily switch between quality and speed and everything inbetween.
Like the 7400C, the 5470 is capable of 48-bit color scans with excellent color reproduction overall. However, the 5470 suffers from the same problems as the 7400 series scanner. Some colors (reds and flesh tones) are a little muddled although the sharpness of the scan were excellent. I didn't think there was much abberation in reds and flesh tones... but discerning users may think otherwise. The 4400 and 4470 had better color reproduction than the 5470 and 7400 scanners despite the 4400 and 4470 being only 1200 dpi scanners. Images on the 4400 and 4470 were not as sharp or detailed as the 5470 and 7400 scanners however. The 5470 is capable of up to 2400 dpi optical resolution and 2400 dpi hardware resolution through the method described above.
Scan speed is documented by HP as being under 35 sec for a 4 x 6-inch color photo into MS Word, under 45 sec for OCRing a full page of text into MS Word, and under 25 sec for black & white drawing into MS Word. Preview scan take up to 8 secs long. Again, this really depends on the connection (USB being faster by a bit than parallel... also assuming nothing else is occupying the USB bus as well!) and the power of the computer it is attached to! The 5470 performed better than these reported times and a bit better in scan times compared to the 7400 to my computer... although the transfer of information seemed to be slower since I use the 7450 with a SCSI connection (if you don't know what this means, don't worry about it... it's not really important. SCSI is much faster than USB and parallel port connection but for a price... usually steep).
Too many buttons? Do I even need the computer attached?
There are a total of 8 buttons with the informative 16 character LCD. There contain the standard quick scan buttons for scan to computer, copy mode, photo album, email, and the such as well as an increase/decrease rocker for number of copies and size adjustments. HP also placed a "powersave" button to reduce the power consumption of the unit when not in use... urm... kinda useless since the scanner decreases its power use when not active. There is a share-to-web button that shortcut to a program where images of manageable size can be placed for web viewing. The 16 character display tells you various steps you're in while scanning and display menu choices as you can access an on-board scanner menu. There is also an options and cancel button as well. The front panel is overall designed very nicely.
Not all roses... Notable problems with the unit
Several issues do come up with this scanner... the scan area only accepts up to letter sized images/documents. Legal sized images are too large for the plate whereas the 7400 accepted up to legal size material (8 x 14 inches).
Color reproduction seemed to be better on the 4400 and 4470 ScanJet than the 7400 and 5470 ScanJets. To me that is bothersome for the price difference between the 4000 versus 5000 and 7000 series scanners. The smallest price difference is $150 between the 4470 and 5470 ScanJets.
Another major problem that exists with all the current ScanJets is that the transparency adapter is near useless. 35mm negatives and slides just do not scan well even with the 2400 dpi resolution. Details on the scans for negatives and slides were excellent... however, color reproduction was downright horrible for a scanner in this price range. Even the 7400 ScanJet was horrible at this... (I didn't test this feature out when I first reviewed the 7400 series ScanJet). The other problem is that the transparency adapter only allows for scanning of a 4 picture 35mm negative, slide, or very small transparency.
Software bundle
The ScanJet 5470Cse comes with HP Precisionscan Pro 3.0 scanning software for business with fully integrated optical character recognition (OCR) capability for PCs (Mac OCR software provided via Readiris), HP Scanjet Copy Utility, HP Share-to-Web software and ACDSee
For PCs you get ReadIris OCR, Corel PrintOffice 2000, Arcsoft PhotoFantasy, NetObjects Fusion, Arcsoft PhotoPrinter Pro, ScanSoft PaperPort, eFax.com, Iris Cardiris, HP Print Creator, ACD Systems ACDsee
For Macs you get Iris Readiris OCR, Corel PrintOffice 2000, Arcsoft PhotoFantasy, NetObjects Matrix, Arcsoft PhotoPrinter Pro, ScanSoft PaperPort, SmithMicro FaxSFT, Iris Cardiris, Arcsoft PhotoPrinter Pro 2000, ACD Systems ACDsee
Now you can see I cut and paste all that good info from HP web site... but there is a noteworthy addition to this bundle. I'm a longtime fan of the NetObject Fusion web page/site editor and was happy to see the Fusion 5.0 program included in the bundle. I've been using it since NetFusion 2.0 was out... and that was nearly 10 years ago. It's definitely showing its age but it's a personal favorite of mine. The overall software bundle is actually rather impressive and good for intermediate to low level advanced users. Not bad at all.
The PrecisionPro software is easy to use but lacks that robustness that you find in Epson's and Canon's drivers. You don't have alot of manual settings to make fine adjestments while scanning. However, the PrecisionPro software and driver work rather well on their own to provide excellent scans. I would liked to see the ability of the PrecisionPro software to be a bit more flexible but it still does a fine job overall, especially if you just want something simply scanned in. Note that this has been traditionally a weakness of the PrecisionPro software for HP.
Overall
This is an excellent scanner as long as you can live with the few shortcomings of this scanner. As long as you don't need slide/negatives/transparency scans and have nothing bigger than letter sized material to scan, you'll be satisfied. If you need legal sized scanning, look at the ScanJet 7400. If you need absolute color reproduction, look at the Epson 1640 scanner. If you need slides and negatives scan, look at a dedicated slide and 35mm scanner. Overall, the color reproduction errors are not severe and will be hard to notice without a discerning eye or unless scanning small items that need severe enlargement as well as the slides/negatives/transparencies problem. The software bundle is impressive. Picture quality is very high with excellent details maintenance. I've also played around with several other scanners and noted that some scanners had a little better color reproduction and color depth (like the Canon CanoScans). Overall I'd still highly recommend this scanner especially for the $299 and under price point!
If you like to see my other scanner reviews, please look at my profile page.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 280
Interface: USB
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
yusakugo
|
 - Top 10 |
|
Member: Rich Go
Location: Somewhere in the NorthEast
Reviews written: 399
Trusted by: 495 members
About Me:
Losing Sleep and Lacking Time... sigh...
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.