HP 5200C

Most flatbed scanner manufacturers at the moment appear to be gradually disappearing down a bargain-bucket black hole. The situation has reached the point at which flatbed scanners are a commodity item, but that doesn't make things any easier for the consumer. Hewlett-Packard has gone against this interminable downward pricing flow and hopes that users will find its ease-of-use message enough to justify a higher price.

The company's first product in this new wave, the 5100C (reviewed issue 44, p171), disappointed with its relatively low specification and below-par quality. The new 5200C attempts to haul HP's scanner range back into contention while continuing with the philosophy and innovations of the 5100C.

Like most HP peripherals, the 5200C is well-built and extremely solid. The base and much of this scanner's frame is made with steel, unlike many of its insubstantial plastic brethren; scanners such as the Microtek Phantom 336CX USB (reviewed issue 54, p177) spring to mind.

A quick look at the rear of the machine gives the first hints as to where the 5200C is coming from. Here you'll find a parallel port, a printer pass-through port, and a USB socket. While clearly not tailored to speedy scanning at high resolutions, this does mean that setting up the 5200C is a relatively painless business. If you stick to the instructions you'll install the software, turn off the PC, connect your scanner, reboot and you'll be ready to start scanning in no time. However, things can go a little awry if you attempt to connect using the supplied USB cable before installing the software.

While the software installation procedure does set up a TWAIN driver for acquiring images from within image-editing applications such as Photoshop, PhotoImpact or the supplied Adobe PhotoDeluxe, it's clear that HP wants you to use the small, green button on the front. This initiates HP's PrecisionScan software which takes you through the scanning process step by step. First, you choose which application you want your scan to end up in, deciding if you want to review or change settings after looking at a preview and to tell the software if you want to scan in colour or monochrome. Click OK and the scanner analyses your original's content, dividing the resulting preview image into text, drawing and photographic areas, and adjusting resolution as well as other settings depending on the target application. Any areas designated as text will then run through PrecisionScan's OCR engine - drawings are converted to vector images, and photos are left as scanned bitmaps.

It's all very clever and successful in shielding the more complex settings and procedures from inexperienced users, but it's completely inadequate for anyone wanting a little more control. In fact, the only adjustment you can make is to change the resolution: there's no way of tweaking colour levels, no histogram tool, no way of altering brightness and contrast levels, the tone curve, or highlights and shadows. In other words, if you don't like what you see first time around, you can't do much with it.

All said, the procedure does seem to work pretty well, although targeting scans to Photoshop results, rather strangely, in scans of 150ppi, and if you want to alter the recognised regions you'll find the interface somewhat clumsy. I scanned in a PC Pro Reviews page and picked Microsoft Word as the final destination. The page was, by and large, reproduced pretty faithfully: images and text were in the right place and 'drawings' were transformed into vector graphics successfully.