My New Flatbed Scanner

[AlanHo]

My old and trusty Agfa Snapscan Touch scanner died over the week-end. We held a moving goodbye ceremony at the local Council tip on Sunday.

I have bought an HP Scanjet 4850 to replace it - which not only does normal document scans but also scans 35mm negatives and transparencies. It will also scan and print a document with one button - just like using a normal photocopier.

The differences between the two scanners are just plain amazing - the new one scans with much greater clarity and the speed difference is phenominal. The bundled image editing and library software seems to be very good - it should be - because it takes up 450 Mb on your hard disc.

The old Agfa scanner would scan an A4 photo in about 2 minutes - the new HP one takes just 18 seconds at 200 dpi.

The old one would scan and OCR an A4 document as a Word document in about 2.5 minutes - the new one takes just 24 seconds with much greater OCR accuracy.

The scanner installation was straightforward and its operation is very user friendly.

I assume that some of the speed increase is because the new scanner is USB2 - the old one is USB1.

Anyone thinking of buying a scanner should consider this one.

[dadyassa]

Thanks, I will keep this in mind, my old HP Scanjet scanner ran on a scsi card and I had serious fun getting it to work with XP.

It recently made horrendous clunking noises, I think the belt was slipping and trying to go in the opposite direction from the light etc, so after about 5 years of good service I binned it.

[scuzzman]

I'm moving this to the Essential Reviews forum, as it is more appropriate there