HP ScanJet 5P review

On first sight, the most striking feature of the ScanJet 5P is a rather prominent aqua green 'scan' button on the front panel, which is designed to make scanning almost as easy as using a photocopier. Aimed at the small office or departmental user, for incorporating images into newsletters, presentations or Web pages, it has an optical resolution of 300dpi which, if required, will interpolate up to 1,200dpi. Apart from the Truecolour 24-bit mode, the 5P also supports the usual line art, greyscale and halftone modes, and is fully TWAIN-compliant.

The ScanJet is built to HP's excellent standards and the attention to detail means that everything from initial setup to daily use is both logical and intuitive. Housed in a fairly slimline case measuring 485 x 306 x 125mm, it looks very clean cut with just a power LED to complement the scan button on the front panel. There's a power switch on the back right-hand side of the unit, while all the connections are at the rear.

Setup is just a matter of finding a free ISA expansion slot in the host PC and pushing in the supplied 16-bit plug and play SCSI card. Then, after powering on the system, Windows 95 detects the card and prompts for the drivers disk. However, the supplied drivers disk was incorrectly labelled, but once this was resolved the rest of the software installed from a fistful of disks and set up the scanner without a problem. Following the general trend, the software comes on a CD, although disks can be ordered if needed.

The quickest way to get started is to place an original in the scanner and press the scan button. This loads the HP PictureScan software, which lets you select the type of original to be scanned, performs a pre-scan, searches the result for pictures and then puts a selection border around any that it finds. The utility initially seems very basic; the controls on the main panel only allow you to accept or cancel a scan, zoom in or out of a selected area. Finally, there's a sharpen filter and three buttons for border settings.

To make adjustments there's an options box that allows the image to be scaled. You can also select printer type, and there are several other minor settings too. Final scans are just a case of selecting the area to be scanned if more than one picture was identified, making any adjustments to the scanning borders, and clicking on 'accept'. Unless PictureScan was called from another TWAIN-compliant application, the default is for the scan to be sent to the supplied Visioneer PaperPort software.

PaperPort is essentially an organiser utility that groups images together. It acts as an OLE server, so that if an application can't call the PictureScan directly, images can be imported into a document via OLE without first having to save the image to disk.

The 5P is also supplied with HP Copier which is compatible with both colour and mono printers for producing convenient copies; Corel Photo Paint Select for Windows, which provides image editing software for adjusting and manipulating scanned images; Caere OmniPage LE for OCR work; and a tutorial for getting to grips with the unit and to introduce novices to the basics of scanning.

For this class of scanner, processing times rate about average; preview scans can take anything from 17 to 26 seconds depending on whether the unit is in power-saving mode. A 150dpi Truecolour scan of a crisp 6 x 4in test photograph takes 17 seconds.

The quality of the final scans are excellent, partly because of the standard of the scanning mechanism, but also because of HP's patented variable-y sampling technology which allows the scanner to vary the optical resolution in the y direction (downward) to meet the requirements of a particular scan. The claimed benefits are faster scanning times and better-quality images with fewer moirÚ patterns, artefacts and jaggies.