Hewlett Packard Scanjet 8270 Flatbed Scanner

Pros: lots of functions, good scan quality
Cons: slower than advertised, speed heavily dependent on your computer

A decision was made at my workplace to digitize all paperwork that was to be archived. In the computer age of today, the fastest way of doing so, is to get a good scanner and turn everything into a PDF document. So far so good. Since the amount of ...

Pros: Marketing lierature looks great. Maybe it would be acceptable if I were scanning photos.
Cons: Slow and image quality poor. Not suited for production scanning.

I purchased this scanner to scan 2 sided documents for financial record keeping. What a mistake. Forget the speed listed in the marketing specs. If you use the ADF, expect 112-179 seconds per side at 600 DPI. Then, all the images appear very light. I tried all the software included in the package and the only way to fix the light/dark issue is when you use the push buttons on the face of the scanner. Then on top of the 112 seconds, you get to wait for the application to open and data to be passed to the application. For this job, pay less with the Fujitsu fi-5150 and be much happier. I swore I would never buy another HP scanner 4 years ago. I wish I had stuck by my decision. Now I have to pay to send it back and re-stock fees. Don't make the same mistake.

Pros: If you're looking for a good time-waster, this is it.
Cons: Slow scans, heavy lid, and very noisy.

For being a "step up" from the HP7490, I'd rather not upgrade. This scanner not only takes at least 10 minutes to start up, but it takes +2 minutes to scan a 5-page document in greyscale using the ADF. Then if you use HP's software, the file size is very large. If you are able to use Adobe Acrobat, you will have a decent size file, but it takes longer to start up the scanner.