HP ScanJet 5100C review

Ease of use and installation has never been a strong point when it comes to scanners. Hewlett-Packard has realised this and aimed its latest scanner, the ScanJet 5100C, squarely at first-time users. In a distinct departure from its existing family of scanning devices, the 5100C uses an EPP parallel port connection rather than the more traditional SCSI.

This decision has certainly made the ScanJet 5100C very simple to install, as there's no need to open the PC to slot in a SCSI interface card. Just plug it into the printer port, install the drivers and the process is complete in a few minutes.

In addition to easy setup, the ScanJet 5100C is a doddle to use. A single button on the front of the scanner launches the HP PrecisionScan utility on your PC. From here you can access a number of settings and image analysis routines that PrecisionScan performs automatically. These are great features for the first-time buyer, but advanced users will find the lack of greater functionality irritating. Basic cropping and resizing are available, but more sophisticated adjustments such as moirÚ and colour mode switching are absent.

Although the Dual Image Scanning routine makes things easier for the novice, shifting control away from the user takes some of the fun and, more importantly, the flexibility out of image pre-processing. Dual Image Scanning analyses a page and sorts the text from the photos, so there's no need for a preview mode. The separate image elements are rubber-banded and can be individually selected to be sent to an output source. For example, if only the logo from letter-headed paper is required, it can be sent directly to Microsoft Word and automatically converted to vector graphic format without any requirement to manually crop and edit. Alternatively, you can send the image to any of the bundled apps - Adobe PhotoDeluxe 2, Caere PageKeeper Lite 3 or the 25-use trial version of OmniPage 8 OCR software - and it can be set for other applications too.

The native 30-bit colour convertor produces a 24-bit colour file. Greyscale is eight-bit, yielding only 256 levels of contrast, and this can restrict image quality. Although the 5100C's optical resolution of 300dpi was used in testing, it can scan from 12dpi up to an interpolated 1,200dpi.

I used a colour target to assess colour accuracy, and a couple of photos to judge detail capture. Each sample was scanned five times and the best result picked. Compared with the reference scan (from our bureau's drum scanner) the 5100C, like its cousin the 6100C, reproduced colours reasonably accurately. Although red and green elements were slightly out, the blue was spot on.

The scan of the black and white photo was a different matter. The 256-level greyscale was unable to resolve fine details and light areas satisfactorily. This gave rise to jagged edges, banding and inconsistency in dark areas. And when compared with the Quality award-winning Umax Astra 1200S (reviewed issue 41, p140), even full-colour scans demonstrated a lack of definition and contrast. This was especially evident when it came to sharp edges and thin lines.

In terms of speed, all scans, irrespective of resolution or size, took just over 30 seconds. It's the processing of the scanned image on your PC that leads to time differences. On a Pentium II/300 with 64Mb of SDRAM, at 12dpi a 93 « 127mm colour target took ten seconds to process compared with six minutes and 27 seconds at the maximum resolution. The same test on the Umax Astra 1200S gave a faster time of two minutes and 15 seconds at 1,200dpi. The main reason for this is that the 5100C produces comparatively smaller file sizes (20Mb as opposed to the Astra's 29Mb) for the same scans saved as LZW-compressed TIFs.