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Rating: 
Summary: A good, solid product, but . . .
Review: Don't believe HP's claim that the 8290 is "network ready". I was disappointed to learn, after I purchased mine, that the scanner cannot be accessed over our network, because our operating system is not NT4. If you use Win98, Win2000, or WinXP, forget the network feature.
Other than that bit of false advertising, I have no complaints. The hardware and software work smoothly and efficiently, and the 25 pages per minute claim is achievable, but only when scanning to a file, which is the best procedure anyway.
Rating:
Summary: A good, solid product, but . . .
Review: Don't believe HP's claim that the 8290 is "network ready". I was disappointed to learn, after I purchased mine, that the scanner cannot be accessed over our network, because our operating system is not NT4. If you use Win98, Win2000, or WinXP, forget the network feature.
Other than that bit of false advertising, I have no complaints. The hardware and software work smoothly and efficiently, and the 25 pages per minute claim is achievable, but only when scanning to a file, which is the best procedure anyway.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't buy if you're using OS X
Review: We bought a Scanjet 8290 with auto document feeder last week because we need a fast scanner to digitize thousands of documents. It seems like none of the really fast scanners work with Macs, only Windows. HP, on the other hand, promised scans "up to 25 pages per minute."Well, we couldn't get it to scan more than 4 pages per minute using our 1 GHz iMac (768 MB RAM). After a couple of days of trying to get it to work, we finally called HP's tech support (their website is so bad it's unbelievable). We were told that the 25 pages per minute rate is for a really souped up Windows machine (2 GHz, loads of RAM, etc). As far as their engineers are concerned, they can't scan more than 4 pages per minute on OS X either (on a machine similar to ours). It boils down to software, and the tech guy said there are no plans to write better software for OS X to fix this discrepancy in performance. I think it's false advertising and a total lack of regard for their customers. Besides, if I'll have to end up using a Windows machine, I would have gone with a different scanner (the Fujitsu ones get good reviews). The only reason I bought HP is because of the OS X compatibility and the purported high scan throughput. For now, I suggest you don't buy an 8290 if you're looking at their promised scan rates and especially if you're on a Mac platform. Their software stinks, and you'll only get 4 pages per minute (if you save all your files into Acrobat; as JPGs, you get 2 pages per minute). I'm back in the market for another scanner, although I'm resigned to the fact that I might have to use a PC to get what I want. But there's no way I'm buying an HP ever again.
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