I've gone through quite a few scanners in my time, going back to the early nineties. My Microtek was highly cherished, but when I got a newer Mac with no SCSI port, I needed a new one. I decided to get an HP Officejet for color printing, scanning, faxing, and copying. I was on the phone with HP for a month, spoke with about 5 different techs all telling me the same things to do -- none of it worked. It would not work with my Mac. They finally agreed to give me a special trade-in deal on a networkable model, which would bypass the issues that seemed to be caused by the USB interface. They soon called me back to say that they didn't have it in stock and that the replacement would be free. That was great -- I saved $150.
Well, it wasn't that great a deal. I got it to work finally thanks to the built-in wi-fi. Unfortunately, whenever I wanted to scan something, I needed to run the setup assistant again, so the lousy HP software would see the scanner. The scan button on the machine didn't work at all. The scanning software was also slow as was the actual scanning. After a while, the document feeder stopped working, as did the fax which was apparently dependent on it. Then the copying stopped when scaling was involved. I finally gave up and bought a tiny little Canon LIDE90 scanner for about $60. This is the best scanner I have ever purchased -- and the cheapest. You can program the buttons on the front of the scanner to scan in different ways -- copy a document and send it to the printer (either of my Xerox machines), make a PDF, send a fax (via modem), etc. The software is very responsive, the scanner is fast, and I haven't had a single problem.
The moral of the story: stay away from HP (my HP digital camera is also sub-par) and all-in-one units. On the other hand, if you need a scanner, look to see what Canon is up to these days. |
