Product Reviews

It's not often that a flatbed scanner is radically different from anything that has come before, but HP's Scanjet 4600 is such a device. While other models' scanning mechanisms are housed under a glass plate, the 4600 keeps its vital organs in its lid. This isn't remarkable in itself, but as both the top and bottom of this lid are transparent, it allows you to put documents face up and see them as they're being scanned. This means no more putting documents in the wrong way up, and no more hitting the Preview button to find that your photos have wafted over each other when you closed the lid.

Ultimately, though, unless these are common problems for you, the 4600's unusual design is little more than a gimmick. Seeing your photos as they're being scanned is mildly entertaining, but our attention was still mainly focused on the scanner's software. What's more, the top-heavy design has

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a significant flaw. Nearly all flatbed scanner lids lock into an open position, but if this one were to do so the weight of the lid would cause it to topple over - and probably damage its scanning mechanism in the process. There's no catch to lock it open, which must be a deliberate attempt to avoid such a disaster, but this makes placing (especially large) documents a little trickier as one hand has to hold the lid. The worst-case scenario is that you forget there's no lock and flip the scanner open to its death - we almost did.

Still, we could put up with the unusual design if the 4600 were up to scratch as a scanner, and in most respects it is. Colour accuracy in our photo tests is the best we've ever seen from a budget scanner, although cheaper models from Canon and Epson aren't very far behind. Scans aren't quite pixel-sharp at the top 2,400dpi optical resolution, but those at 1,200dpi are up to scratch.

It's fast, too, managing a 300dpi A4 scan in 21 seconds. Preview scans are incredibly quick at just three seconds, but slow lamp warm-up times negate this. More annoying is that the otherwise excellent TWAIN driver closes after each scan, which makes multiple scans particularly laborious. The rest of the software bundle covers a range of tasks well, but it's disappointing that there's no image editor.

Despite excellent image quality, we'd much rather have a transparency adaptor than a quirky design for what is a fairly expensive 2,400dpi scanner.