One of the most eye-catching devices on show at CES Unveiled – the curtain-raiser for the world’s biggest tech show – was the Lexmark Genesis.

This highly unusual all-in-one focuses on something that gets very little attention these days: scanning. Lexmark are rather cheesily referring to it as the “Now-In-One Printer” because of the speed at which the scanner operates.

Pop a document in the scanner tray – which unlike your traditional flatbed scanner, stands vertically rather than horizontally – and a preview of the scan appears on the Genesis’s 4.3in touchscreen LCD almost instantly (or within 750 milliseconds, according to a Lexmark spokesperson).  A full scan is completed within a couple of seconds.

How does it achieve such speeds? Well, it’s not really “scanning” in the traditional sense of the word. Mounted behind the glass is a 10-megapixel CMOS sensor, flanked by two banks of LEDs that fire in sequenced RGB (as you can just about make out in the shot below). In other words, it’s taking a digital photo of the page.

While the speeds were very impressive, it was difficult to get a sense of the scanning quality on the bustling CES showfloor, so we’ll have to reserve judgement on this techinque until we get our hands on a full review unit.

One thing we did observe, however, was the difficulties caused by the vertical scanning plate. Anything other than a full A4 document has to be clipped to the frame of the scanning plate, making it a little tricky to precisely line up multiple photos, for instance, or overlap one document over another.

However, the Genesis looks very smart, the touchscreen-driven controls were very simple and intuitive, and it’s refreshing to see somebody attempting to do something different in the hideously static all-in-one market.

The Genesis will cost $399 in the US; UK pricing is yet to be confirmed.

You may have noticed the latest review up on the PC Pro homepage, of HP’s Pavilion HDX9320EA laptop. A gloriously over the top machine, with oodles of style and a price tag that’s certainly not as high as we expected when it was crane-lifted out of the box.

But is it actually a laptop? Could it feasibly be argued that this leviathan will comfortably sit on the average lap? At some point a desktop replacement becomes, well, just a desktop by another name.

The HP weighs 7kg on its own, and a back-breaking 8.2kg when you chuck in the power brick too. Add the fact that none of the major UK bag makers produce anything to fit such a beast and I’d argue the HP “Dragon” is actually not much of a portable at all.

Yes, you could tuck it under one arm (if you’re a freakish giant like our very own Mike Jennings) but that’s hardly feasible on public transport. Which limits you to car journeys – a mode of travel which is equally hospitable to desktop PCs and their multiple peripherals – and use around the home.

I like the HP, I really do, and I can see the appeal in a sense – Mike would argue that it’s great to be able to play a game upstairs with the power of a PC, then sling it on the coffee table while the football’s on, all before sitting down to a movie in HD on the huge 20in screen.

Power, clarity and flexibility in one versatile package – perhaps it belongs more in the lifestyle PC category with the wonderful Dell XPS One (right) than it does with other laptops. (In fact, Dell has form in this area – remember the XPS M2010?)

But if it was my wallet involved in the decision, my hard-earned pennies being slapped down, would I really choose such a form-factor for myself?

In a word, no. I’d spend the same amount on a desktop and monitor, and I’d probably get more from my investment. Look at the A List. I could save £150+ and get the Cyberpower Gamer Ultra M2 Quad, with its awesome graphics, huge hard disk and 22in TFT.

Not portable enough? How about the Shuttle XPC P2 3500G (left), with its huge hard disk, strong graphics and tiny size? With the £200+ saved I could take my pick of the best 22in TFTs out there.

In fact, there are all manner of alternatives I’d go for before I’d buy the HP, and all of them fall firmly into traditional “laptop” or “desktop” categories.

The HP Pavilion HDX9320EA is undoubtedly a fine machine, and I won’t deny it’s fully deserving of its Recommended award. But I’d beg HP, Dell and anyone else who’s listening: for the sake of our spines, let’s stop at 20in, hey? Please?

A few months back Sony was forced to scrap its outrageous plans to charge punters extra to get their brand new laptop clean of “crapware” – the useless bundles of trial software that seem to clog up more and more systems that enter the Labs thse days.

Many of you left comments agreeing that enough is enough, and reader rjp2000 made the point that the printer and camera markets are just as bad as laptop manufacturers. From experience I knew that (s)he was spot on, but this month that point has been rammed home far more irritatingly than I ever imagined.

You see, I’m currently holed up in the dark and lonely PC Pro Labs with a haul of printers and all-in-ones fast approaching 20. That’s a lot of printers. That’s a lot of printing, scanning and copying. But, most painfully, that’s one heck of a lot of installing.

From downloading one manufacturer’s driver and application setup file of a ludicrous 198MB, to another installing a list of accompanying applications that went well into double figures, pretty much every installation of a printer has taken 20 minutes or more. Programs to ease printing; to simplify scanning; to put pretty little cartoon frames around your photos before you print them and inevitably bin them in disappointment.

Does anyone actually use these things?

Of all the printers I’ve owned, I’ve never made use of any of the bundled applications. OCR software I can admittedly see the point of, but apart from that there’s nothing useful this crapware does that I can’t do in the simple driver settings. Even in a graphics utility as basic as Microsoft Paint, clicking Print | Preferences brings up the very same options as you’ll find in something as advanced as Photoshop, so no expensive software is required to access your printer’s full potential.

Thankfully, most printer installations at least give you the option of selecting which individual utilities to install. But with most also burying the whole lot in an “Easy Install” button, manufacturers know that their bloated, irritating and largely useless bundled extras will nonetheless make their way on to a huge number of PCs.

The VGC-LJ25L is only available in Korea for 1,399,000 KRW (around £680), and consists of a picture frame-style, glass- surround, 15.4in display with the usual 1,280 x 800 laptop resolution. With a discreetly hidden 2.1GHz Core 2 Duo T8100, 2GB of RAM and a 200GB hard disk, it’s actually a pretty capable PC.

But when you look at the photo below, we just can’t see the point. A half-laptop, half-PC, with a little bit of Sony’s VAIO VGC-LT2S styling thrown in, who exactly is going to want to carry it around? And more to the point, how do you carry it around without damaging the thing?!

“I know, let’s cut off half the keyboard!” might have sounded novel in that ideas meeting but we can’t see it reaching these shores anytime soon.

[Original story via AVING.]