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HP ScanJet 3970 Digital Flatbed Scanner

HP ScanJet 3970 Digital Flatbed Scanner

List Price: $121.00
Your Price: Too Low To Display
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Getting better daily
Review: If your looking for a decent scanner for a low price, the ScanJet 3970 Digital Flatbed Scanner is a good choice. The lamp takes a little while to warm-up and the scanner is somewhat noisy when it copies the image, but the quality of the scan and ease of use is above average. The individual functions and settings are easy to understand and allow some basic photo manipulation. The more I use the scanner, the more I like it.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Great Scanner for the Price
Review: It's easy to be critical of a scanner that sells for less that a hundred bucks. But it you are looking for a versatile unit that produces great results at a very affordable price, this is the one.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: HP SCANJET 3570 DISPOSABLE?
Review: Like others have mentioned in their review, my HP 3570 worked fine for a while. The problem started when after moving, I attempted to scan with my scanjet. Nothing works! It is like there is no power to the scanner, though it's connected exactly the way it was before I moved. I decided to see what what happen if I installed it on another computer and again - NOTHING WORKS!!! I tried all the troubleshooting and driver installing, updating, etc.... NOTHING! I see now after reading other's reviews, I am not the only one who feels scammed, ripped-off, dissappointed, let down, etc. by this pathetic HP product! Shame on what I used to think of as a respectable name in computer equipment!!!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Good Hardware - Nightmare Software
Review: The scanner itself gave me good scans of my documents and pictures and did so promptly. So I was very satistfied with the hardware and with the transfer speed from the scanner to my PC.

But the software was a nightmare - a problem that after 3 days, 4 reinstalls, 2 repairs, and 2 calls to HP Support led me to return the scanner.

Here's what happened with the software. The HP Director showed up with red X's instead of icons, and it had text that was in courier or some other format that stuck out the right side of the window. The preview screen showed up the same way, plus the preview area was about as big as my thumbnail and not enlargable in any way that I could find.

I went online with HP Support, and the result was a recommendation for an uninstall and reinstall. I did this, being careful to unplug the USB from the PC and power from the scanner, but the results were the same. Back online with HP Support, who contended that there was a "software conflict", even though I had shut down everything possible with task manager and no applications were running when I did the install or when I tried the HP Director and Preview again.

I wound up doing a total of 4 reinstalls and 2 "repairs". None of them did any good. In fact, things even got worse. My Ulead Photoimpact and Microsoft Imaging now somehow no longer could find the TWAIN.DLL (which they at least could do after the first install), even though TWAIN.DLL was definitely there in the Windows directory and I copied it off the install disk again just to be certain it was not corrupted somehow.

After 3 days and nights of trying mightily to make it work, I had enough and took it back.

I was not at all impressed with the HP support quality. It was great that they were there and very responsive, but their "help" was totally useless. Unfortunately, this was what I experienced when my otherwise excellent HP 6200C scanner just would not work most of the time. HP support's answer to everything is reinstall the software and if that does not work then it is a "software conflict".

So I am shopping again for a scanner.

(Win 98, 500MHz Pentium III, plenty of memory and disk space, USB 1 but it runs other USB 2 peripherals fine)

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Great For Photo's Crap For The Rest
Review: This Scanner is wonderfull for scanning your old pics but it is extremly difficult to scan negatives it can be done if you have a couple of hours and a lot of patience and i do mean a lot of patience the software is its main problem i think the scanner itself is fully capable but the software sucks it does scan documents well if you change the software settings but who wants to do that every single time if you leave the settings alone you wind up with a nice gray graphic in the center of the page that looks exactly like the slide tray in the lid

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: If you buy it for Negs/Slides you will be disappointed.
Review: This scanner seems to have been looked at more and more because of it's ability to scan negs and slides for a cost of less than $100. Let me caution you...you will get what you pay for.

The regular document scanning functions produce decent results, probably right up there with any other scanner in this price range. The negative scanning/slide scanning feature produces grainy, blotchy, blurry, mucky, pitiful images. Oh, sure; if all you want is something that will produce a decent web-ready 4x6 image, you can't go wrong. But; if you want a scanner that will produce a printable image, look elsewhere. This one will not do the job.

As for the software, this is probably the worst I have ever used. Everything is Javascript oriented, and HTML in style. The software locks up, you might get an "Image cannot be displayed" page, or just a plain blank window. Who knows? What worked fine five minutes ago will now receive "fatal errors" and no longer work worth a darn.

Truly folks, if you want a document/photo scanner, there are better ones out there for less. If you want a negative/slide scanner, there are much better ones out there if you will be willing to pay a little bit more.

Don't waste your money. HP didn't waste any of theirs on you. Not when it comes to the 3970, anyway.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Paper yes, slides and photos NO!
Review: With a desire to scan in bunches of old photos and some recent slides, I shopped around for a decent scanner. I specifically chose the HP due to brand name, features relative to competitors and the fact that it was not bottom of the range, in other words trying to avoid the "you get what you pay for" syndrome.

What a mistake. The box arrived with a rattling loose sound, but no visible damage was evident. Scans were just an aweful experience.

- Scanning normal paper documents to tiff files was satisfactory, but slow and noisy.

- Scanning slides was aweful. Even at the highest resolution (and I tried every resolution) the images were simply unuseable. My $20 webcam images are of superior quality to the highest quality slide image I obtained on this scanner.

- Photo's, while better than slides, were still far off what can be expected. Color was washed out. There was no sharp detail.

Simply put, a waste of time. I'm not sure whether the model that I received was broken (I hope for HP's sake that it was) given the rattling sound, or whether this is just one lousy product. Don't waste your money or time!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Poor software, poor copies, great photos with patience
Review: With some effort, I was amazed at the great photo copying ability of the scanner although the software makes you want to smash it immediately. Very difficult to use and resets itself at every opportunity. As a copier for text documents it is HORRIBLE!!! Using the print mode on a text document yields pixelated, grainy unreadable prints. This is TOTALLY unacceptable! Isn't that what a scanner is supposed to do first and then for the additional money be a good photo copier? Like one other reviewer, my HP scanner now also has a greasy fog on the inside of the glass plate. Wonderful. I wasted weeks trying to untangle the software difficulties and now am ready to leave this junk on the doorstep of the seller and buy a Canon Scanner like I should have done in the first place. Do not waste your money. HP needs to do a lot better.


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