J
JP Roberts
Dear all,
I've been using my old reliable Scanjet 4c for about 8 years now and never
had any problem with it until now. When I moved from Win 98 to XP my HP
Deskjet 895Cxi lost some functionality but my Scanjet 4c was the one I
thought wouldn't be making it. Well, I was wrong. After getting an Adaptec
SCSI 2904 card it was even faster than it had ever been. That was in July.
Now, a couple of weeks ago it started giving some errors and it has now
stopped communicating properly with the PC altogether - which is attibutable
to old age.
Anyway, last July when I read on HP's website that the 4c was no longer
supported under XP, I decided to buy the next best thing - which I thought
was a Scanjet 8200 -. After getting it up and running and using it for a
day, I was quickly back to my old 4c and shelved the 8200. The USB port was
often unable to communicate properly, and there was a vast number of other
issues.
Now when my trusty 4c stopped working, I've had no remedy but to get the
8200 out of its box again. I checked with the HP website and downloaded a
myriad patches - which don't tell much of HP's first release. However, the
most shocking thing came when I realised that even customers like myself,
who've had the thing for just only half a year do have to pay to get the
latest HP drivers. Well, that did it for me, I'm never buying HP again. I'll
be looking at everything Jap from now on.
The biggest problem with these latest HP scanners is their twain drivers are
so poorly written that if you try to use them under Paperport - my favourite
scanning soft - the pop-up twain screen goes off immediately the moment any
page scan has been completed. This means, for example, that if you are
planning to scan say 3 Grayscale 200ppp pages from a book, you will have to
do the following:
1.- Click the Pport Scan button.
2.- Wait for the HP twain to initialize.
3.- Wait for a preview to be run
4.- Choose Grayscale from a drop-down menu.
5.- Choose 200ppp from another drop-down.
6.- Run the scan.
Now the most nagging thing occurs, the HP twain dialog box disappears, and
you're back to step number 1 for every new page. The really stupid software
does not even include a preset that is automatically preloaded, so if you
customize a scan, you will have to load it every single time.
I have no idea how to write software but I am quite confident if I had the
time I would be writing something that would be 10-fold better than this
rubbish.
I would have never imagined that HP's budgeting was so tight - one cannot
tell from their prices.
It seems to me the old days of HP's doing things to last and to add to their
customers' satisfaction are long gone. I guess their main interest now is to
make them short-lasting so that we have to buy them more often than ever.
Time to switch to ANY other brand, guys.
Now, what are your recommendations for a really fast flatbed which works
fine at a click under Paperport and offers a very good resolution?
Thanks,
JP Roberts
I've been using my old reliable Scanjet 4c for about 8 years now and never
had any problem with it until now. When I moved from Win 98 to XP my HP
Deskjet 895Cxi lost some functionality but my Scanjet 4c was the one I
thought wouldn't be making it. Well, I was wrong. After getting an Adaptec
SCSI 2904 card it was even faster than it had ever been. That was in July.
Now, a couple of weeks ago it started giving some errors and it has now
stopped communicating properly with the PC altogether - which is attibutable
to old age.
Anyway, last July when I read on HP's website that the 4c was no longer
supported under XP, I decided to buy the next best thing - which I thought
was a Scanjet 8200 -. After getting it up and running and using it for a
day, I was quickly back to my old 4c and shelved the 8200. The USB port was
often unable to communicate properly, and there was a vast number of other
issues.
Now when my trusty 4c stopped working, I've had no remedy but to get the
8200 out of its box again. I checked with the HP website and downloaded a
myriad patches - which don't tell much of HP's first release. However, the
most shocking thing came when I realised that even customers like myself,
who've had the thing for just only half a year do have to pay to get the
latest HP drivers. Well, that did it for me, I'm never buying HP again. I'll
be looking at everything Jap from now on.
The biggest problem with these latest HP scanners is their twain drivers are
so poorly written that if you try to use them under Paperport - my favourite
scanning soft - the pop-up twain screen goes off immediately the moment any
page scan has been completed. This means, for example, that if you are
planning to scan say 3 Grayscale 200ppp pages from a book, you will have to
do the following:
1.- Click the Pport Scan button.
2.- Wait for the HP twain to initialize.
3.- Wait for a preview to be run
4.- Choose Grayscale from a drop-down menu.
5.- Choose 200ppp from another drop-down.
6.- Run the scan.
Now the most nagging thing occurs, the HP twain dialog box disappears, and
you're back to step number 1 for every new page. The really stupid software
does not even include a preset that is automatically preloaded, so if you
customize a scan, you will have to load it every single time.
I have no idea how to write software but I am quite confident if I had the
time I would be writing something that would be 10-fold better than this
rubbish.
I would have never imagined that HP's budgeting was so tight - one cannot
tell from their prices.
It seems to me the old days of HP's doing things to last and to add to their
customers' satisfaction are long gone. I guess their main interest now is to
make them short-lasting so that we have to buy them more often than ever.
Time to switch to ANY other brand, guys.
Now, what are your recommendations for a really fast flatbed which works
fine at a click under Paperport and offers a very good resolution?
Thanks,
JP Roberts