The HP Scanjet 4670
Starting off my 2nd post with my first piece of antiquated tech. Its a pretty scanner actually, and you don't hear that in a sentence too often.
It's fast, quiet, and doesn't take up much space on the desktop. They could have gone a long way with this one, unfortunately its a dead series. :(
They stopped making this scanner back in the days of XP. Which really isn't all that far off in the real world. In compuland however thats ages ago! Worse then even that however, they stopped making drivers for it before Vista even came out. Apparently they teased some people with the idea of drivers the first few years Vista was out in the wild, but then cancelled the whole thing.
This is really one of the reasons that Corporations suck! They dont have to, and they don't alway, but quite often, its just a pile of suckage after the glitzy ad campaign wears off. They could have a legacy department that slowly works on updating drivers for things, supports older epuipment, puts up documentation for when they finally figure its no longer worth it. All things that would be cheap for them. ..maybe even make the drivers part an unofficial thing with rewards to their coders for legacy drivers. ..or even opensource the old ones when they are clearly no longer interested in taking care of the brand they nurtured all they way into our pocket books.
I'm not that mad about it really. I bought this particular one used. Though I do remember being impressed when I saw the thing new in at Fry's. Never saw one again until this one popped up on Craigslist for $25.
Its great because it doesn't have any lid. The holder doubles as a lid if you want it to, but you can lift it out of the cradle and put the glass up against anything you want to scan! This is very cool, and I've found it to be handy a number of times, especially when trying to get to certain parts of larger books or magazines.
The reason I'm so deeply involved with it right now is that I'm working on scanning in the piles of slides that my family have generated over the eons. I'd dearly love to afford one of those dedicated slide scanners with the "digital ice" technology and all that magic. As you can probably guess from the $25 price point though a $1500 dedicated film scanner just isnt in the budget right now. So I make do.
Unfortunately that brings me to the weak part of this scanner, driver quality. :( HP does have a generic driver that will run this scanner in Vista and win 7, "yay"! But it won't run the "transparent materials adapter", the part that scans film and slides. "Boo!".One awesome thing I've discovered though is Vuescan. One of the top few sets of scanning software out there. Why is it so awesome you might ask? ..because the developer has a similar sense for older tech to myself. Vuescan supports just about every scanner ever made, out of date ones, even SCSI ones.
So I can now run my scanner, and even the TMA adapter that I need for the slides. (So many slides!) So this is where the speed comes in handy.
Unfortunately theres still a problem.. the quality of the scans for these slides is somewhat questionable. Its clearly a software issue, but one that will never be resolved since HP gave up the ghost on this one. Any very dark slide will come up with vertical banding across the entire length of the picture. :( This is very noticeable in any dark picture that you have to lighten up to see the subject matter.
Good enough for my current needs, and Ill be working long hours into the night with photoshop repairing the damage to some of these. But with just a little tweak to the firmware HP could have made me a believer in their products. Maybe even enough to go out and by some more of them. Come at the tech world the way I do however it gives me a good scope to see just how well a company is going to treat a customer after they buy that shiny bauble at the store. ..and in this case it screams, "Not very well."
Good things Ive discovered - Vuescan
Bad Things Ive learned - HP doesnt like supporting legacy products, the HP scanjet 4670 had real potential but will just make most people angry.
Things broken for this article - none. yay!
Starting off my 2nd post with my first piece of antiquated tech. Its a pretty scanner actually, and you don't hear that in a sentence too often.
It's fast, quiet, and doesn't take up much space on the desktop. They could have gone a long way with this one, unfortunately its a dead series. :(
They stopped making this scanner back in the days of XP. Which really isn't all that far off in the real world. In compuland however thats ages ago! Worse then even that however, they stopped making drivers for it before Vista even came out. Apparently they teased some people with the idea of drivers the first few years Vista was out in the wild, but then cancelled the whole thing.
This is really one of the reasons that Corporations suck! They dont have to, and they don't alway, but quite often, its just a pile of suckage after the glitzy ad campaign wears off. They could have a legacy department that slowly works on updating drivers for things, supports older epuipment, puts up documentation for when they finally figure its no longer worth it. All things that would be cheap for them. ..maybe even make the drivers part an unofficial thing with rewards to their coders for legacy drivers. ..or even opensource the old ones when they are clearly no longer interested in taking care of the brand they nurtured all they way into our pocket books.
I'm not that mad about it really. I bought this particular one used. Though I do remember being impressed when I saw the thing new in at Fry's. Never saw one again until this one popped up on Craigslist for $25.
Its great because it doesn't have any lid. The holder doubles as a lid if you want it to, but you can lift it out of the cradle and put the glass up against anything you want to scan! This is very cool, and I've found it to be handy a number of times, especially when trying to get to certain parts of larger books or magazines.
The reason I'm so deeply involved with it right now is that I'm working on scanning in the piles of slides that my family have generated over the eons. I'd dearly love to afford one of those dedicated slide scanners with the "digital ice" technology and all that magic. As you can probably guess from the $25 price point though a $1500 dedicated film scanner just isnt in the budget right now. So I make do.
Unfortunately that brings me to the weak part of this scanner, driver quality. :( HP does have a generic driver that will run this scanner in Vista and win 7, "yay"! But it won't run the "transparent materials adapter", the part that scans film and slides. "Boo!".One awesome thing I've discovered though is Vuescan. One of the top few sets of scanning software out there. Why is it so awesome you might ask? ..because the developer has a similar sense for older tech to myself. Vuescan supports just about every scanner ever made, out of date ones, even SCSI ones.
So I can now run my scanner, and even the TMA adapter that I need for the slides. (So many slides!) So this is where the speed comes in handy.
Unfortunately theres still a problem.. the quality of the scans for these slides is somewhat questionable. Its clearly a software issue, but one that will never be resolved since HP gave up the ghost on this one. Any very dark slide will come up with vertical banding across the entire length of the picture. :( This is very noticeable in any dark picture that you have to lighten up to see the subject matter.
Good enough for my current needs, and Ill be working long hours into the night with photoshop repairing the damage to some of these. But with just a little tweak to the firmware HP could have made me a believer in their products. Maybe even enough to go out and by some more of them. Come at the tech world the way I do however it gives me a good scope to see just how well a company is going to treat a customer after they buy that shiny bauble at the store. ..and in this case it screams, "Not very well."
Good things Ive discovered - Vuescan
Bad Things Ive learned - HP doesnt like supporting legacy products, the HP scanjet 4670 had real potential but will just make most people angry.
Things broken for this article - none. yay!
VueScan does not support this scanner (anymore). I had to go to an old computer to installe the ancient HP software, and then there was the vertical banding. That seems to be a mistake from HP, very very bad!
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