HP ScanJet 4570cxi Flatbed Scanner

Rating:
Summary: Not Quite the HP Quality I Expected
Review: We just got a 4570c at my work, and I have to say, I'm a bit disappointed. The flatbed scanning seems to be fine for black and white line art and color photos, but I've been using the slide attachment with 35mm slides, and it really doesn't impress me. It looks to me like an actual focus problem. If I zoom in on the highest optical resolution (2400dpi), to 1:1, I am not close enough to see the pixels, but I completely lose detail like grass blades and tire treads that are easily visible with a loupe on the slide. Scanning these slides at 600dpi was essentially as good as 2400dpi. I don't think that's reasonable. As a flatbed, it works nice. The color is good and the resolution is excellent. Actually I just tried an experiment. I took the slide out of the slide adapter and taped it to the bottom face of the adapter, so that the film is as close to the scanner glass as possible. That made a noticeable resolution improvement! So it looks like dropping the film 0.065 inch closer to the glass makes a difference in focus! I'll have to try a UMAX or Microtek that have the backlight built into the lid. I have also had a lot of trouble with the HP picture manager software. It had lots of trouble finding directories on my C drive, in Win 2000 Pro. I switched to Presto PageManager and all those problems went away. To sum up, the 4570c is a well-built, good quality flatbed scanner, but the slide/negative adapter isn't worth much, and the software seems to be flakey. I guess it's possible that these problems are fixed in the 4570cxi, but I doubt it.