Rating: 
Summary: Wretched
Review: I bought this scanner about six months ago, needing a photo feeder - I have
about 5,000 archived photos that I want in electronic format. Unfortunately,
the hardware and the software are both deeply flawed, and automated
scanning is not feasible.The problem with the hardware is that the feeder is too sensitive to so-called
"jams". When a photo is sent to the angled output tray, if it does not precisely
fall into position immediately it prevents a plastic lever from snapping back into
place - and then falsely reports a "jam" and halting processing of the stack,
even though absolutely nothing is preventing it from starting to move the
next photo into position. The only way to avoid this is to grab each photo
as it arrives in the output tray and pull it out of the way of the lever,
making unattended bulk scanning impossible. The software is even worse. The interface is clumsy - apparently designed by
the suits to be as non-confusing as possible by presenting no options and
little feedback while a scan is underway. It is easy to make an elementary
mistake like scanning an entire stack of photos at the wrong resolution because
the software gives no indication of which profile it is about to use when
scanning starts. But worst of all is its exception handling. If any sort of
error occurs, not only are you almost certain to lose the scan currently in
progress, but on occasion every scan of the entire session will disappear! I could hardly believe it. Rather than saving each photo after it's successfully
scanned in, the included software keeps them in memory (or in some unknown disk
location), saving them only at the end the session. There have been times when
I have lost ten or more photos just because one of those near the end encountered
one of the false "jam" reports described above - and the software gave only a
useless error message and ended without saving any of the scans. There are plenty of minor flaws as well. Photos are not cropped, and part of
the scanner hardware always appears at the edges of a 4x6 print. Very little
customization of the buttons is possible (I consider the "E-Mail" and "WWW"
buttons absolutely useless, as I have my own workflow for getting photos to
my website, yet it won't allow me to use them for something else). And no
customization of output filenames when automatically scanning a series of
photos is possible. I regretted this purchase from the second day I owned the scanner, but thought
I could overcome its flaws. Standing by the scanner for twenty minutes tonight,
pulling photo after photo out of the output tray (for every single one of them
failed to fall into the one position that wouldn't cause a false "jam" report),
I realized this was a lost cause and I am now in the market for an automated
photo feeder that actually works. Do not, under any circumstances, buy this product.
Rating:
Summary: Wretched
Review: I bought this scanner about six months ago, needing a photo feeder - I have
about 5,000 archived photos that I want in electronic format. Unfortunately,
the hardware and the software are both deeply flawed, and automated
scanning is not feasible. The problem with the hardware is that the feeder is too sensitive to so-called
"jams". When a photo is sent to the angled output tray, if it does not precisely
fall into position immediately it prevents a plastic lever from snapping back into
place - and then falsely reports a "jam" and halting processing of the stack,
even though absolutely nothing is preventing it from starting to move the
next photo into position. The only way to avoid this is to grab each photo
as it arrives in the output tray and pull it out of the way of the lever,
making unattended bulk scanning impossible. The software is even worse. The interface is clumsy - apparently designed by
the suits to be as non-confusing as possible by presenting no options and
little feedback while a scan is underway. It is easy to make an elementary
mistake like scanning an entire stack of photos at the wrong resolution because
the software gives no indication of which profile it is about to use when
scanning starts. But worst of all is its exception handling. If any sort of
error occurs, not only are you almost certain to lose the scan currently in
progress, but on occasion every scan of the entire session will disappear! I could hardly believe it. Rather than saving each photo after it's successfully
scanned in, the included software keeps them in memory (or in some unknown disk
location), saving them only at the end the session. There have been times when
I have lost ten or more photos just because one of those near the end encountered
one of the false "jam" reports described above - and the software gave only a
useless error message and ended without saving any of the scans. There are plenty of minor flaws as well. Photos are not cropped, and part of
the scanner hardware always appears at the edges of a 4x6 print. Very little
customization of the buttons is possible (I consider the "E-Mail" and "WWW"
buttons absolutely useless, as I have my own workflow for getting photos to
my website, yet it won't allow me to use them for something else). And no
customization of output filenames when automatically scanning a series of
photos is possible. I regretted this purchase from the second day I owned the scanner, but thought
I could overcome its flaws. Standing by the scanner for twenty minutes tonight,
pulling photo after photo out of the output tray (for every single one of them
failed to fall into the one position that wouldn't cause a false "jam" report),
I realized this was a lost cause and I am now in the market for an automated
photo feeder that actually works. Do not, under any circumstances, buy this product.
Rating: 
Summary: High quality scans - but has some problems
Review: I bought this scanner pretty much just for the automatic feeder. Based on earlier reviews I read, i was half expecting to return it. I was amazed at the image quality it gave from 4X6 prints. I had a few jams, but they weren't too common. HP tells you not to scan a picture more than 5 times using the automatic photo feeder, and I can see why. If you look at glossy photos under the light after feeding them through once, you can see some damage. But the biggest problem I had with the scanner was that when the scanner scans through a stack of pictures, it will scan every picture and once all are scanned, then it sends them to the computer. Frequently, I would scan a stack at 600 dpi, and at 600 dpi it takes a considerable amount of time, the scanning program would mess up in the middle of the transfer, and you'd have to rescan half of the stack. the HP website didn't have any patches or troubleshooting to solve this particular problem. I ended up just keeping the stack size small, finishing my pictures, then returning the scanner. I have windows ME, which isn't the most reliable, so you might be ok with another operating system. So in my experience, you still save time scanning pictures, even with the occasional transfer mess ups, and while the photo feeder damages the pictures, all the handling of transferring pictures to and from a regular scanner could amount to damage too if you're not careful. This scanner is definitely worth taking a look at, but if you have problems, don't be afraid to return it
Rating: 
Summary: returned it the very next day
Review: I bought this unit, and was pretty excited about the photo feeder. Unfortunately it didn't work. The feeder would make noises but would never grab any photos. I tried chatting with HPs support over the internet. It was horrible. I had to sit and wait as many as 7 or 8 minutes for the guy to type a response back. And all he could suggest was I try a different kind of paper (hmmm, lets see, its photo paper?) So I took the scanner back the very next day. Don't waste your money on this. There are much better scanners available.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Idea!
Review: I fully expected to have to return the scanner after reading all those bad reviews. But I'm glad I took the risk to buy it!! After scanning several hundred old photos(they can be any size between 3-by-5-inches and 4-by-6-inches as long as each bunch is the same size), I am extremely pleased. There were maybe one or two minor jams - no problem. Also, I can't see any marks on my originals, and the automatic cropping is a big convenience as well. I have WinXP with 512 MB of RAM. My only complaint concerns the software. HP tries to guess what you want to do. After scanning, it is set up to collect your group of photos into a separate folder every month, which is located in My Pictures. So if you bulk-scan several groups of pix that should go into the same folder on your Desktop, you run into problems. The numbering starts over with each scanned group, so you can't just add a new group of images to the last one because they will have the same numbers. (Maybe there's a way to change that, but who wants to wade through all the help files.) This scanner is a great invention, and much needed to deal with those shoe boxes full of old photos. Maybe HP listened to all the complaints and improved their product! The included Funhouse program is very nice too.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Idea - Early Problems - GREAT RECOVERY
Review: I had a lot of complaints on the unit at first - Automatic Photo Feeder not being reliable and software not working. I called HP and had a new photo feeder in a couple of days that is working perfectly. I was connected with superb technical support(Donald), turns out that the software problems were due to left-overs on my older computer(XP). Everything is now working great. This is the only scanner I found with a auto feeder. I am very happy with it.
Rating:
Summary: Avoid buying this Scanner !
Review: I have spent hours and hours trying to get this scanner to work properly. But the software crashes permanently and scans of +10 pages systematically crash the PC. HORRIBLE.
Rating:
Summary: A real disappointment
Review: I installed the scanner and downloaded the most recent OSX software from the HP web site. The product claims there is no warm up time. That is correct if you dont count the 35-40 second wait time for each and ever scan! Also, the auto photo feeder did not work. Many hour spent trying to make the equipment work. Finally had enough and took back to store.
Rating:
Summary: Cool Idea - Not ready for prime time
Review: I purchased the 5500c solely for the photo feeder capabilities. The driver and related software is terrible and would not work at all under XP. The web-based tech support fix was very destructive (find all files with -twain- in them and delete! - please!) Next I installed on a win 98se machine and the software worked better but the APF repeatedly reported jams after feeding one photo and often would not feed any photos at all. I am a very tech saavy and experienced scanner user with transparency, photo and document scanners and had a terrible time with this one. I hoped to scan a large number of photos efficiently and have had an HP 6350cse with a document feeder that has worked great for years and an HP Digital Sender that I bought for my ofice that is also great, but the document expertise does not appear to have translated well to this innovative attempt at photo feeding. Sadly I will be taking this back tomorrow and doing lots of scans on my Epson 2450 instead.
Rating:
Summary: Scanner doesn't work even with Tech Support
Review: I purchased this scanner because I needed something for negatives and photos, my husband needed something for documents. The negative scanner works ok as long as you do it from the scanner software and not editing software like photoshop or paint shop. The photo auto feeder has never worked. I spent 2 and 1/2 hours on "live support" from them and was bounced through 3 "agents". (I got one of them twice) Not only could they not solve the problem they infromed me, after I told them that I was tired of waiting for them to "review the notes", that my best option was to contact them the next day. Then different people would be there. I wouldn't ever recommend this scanner or this company to anybody.
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