Product Reviews

The lid of this scanner incorporates a hinged transparency and photo unit. Lifting it reveals two backlit slots for slides and negatives and a holder for standard-size photo prints. This is certainly an unusual feature and is easier to load than most transparency units, but it has some drawbacks.

There are no markings to indicate whether you should load negatives emulsion or film side-up. The design of the slots makes it impossible to scan the middle images of strips with more than four frames. The photo holder takes 15x10cm prints, but the lip that retains them is only 13.5cm wide.

ADVERTISEMENT

This causes cropping at the picture's sides unless the photo is placed conventionally on the scanner bed.

The driver was a little hard to understand and, when using TWAIN to scan batches of material, it didn't remember settings between sessions. In previews it automatically selected an area containing the image, but it wasn't always accurate. The de-skewing feature didn't seem to work at all.

Reflective scans were reasonably sharp. At the default Enhance Colour setting we found that images were too bright and low in contrast, but with this disabled the colours were quite accurate, if a little dull. A preview took just 10 seconds, and an A4 scan at 300dpi was rapid at 15.5 seconds. At these speeds, though, the 4070 was quite noisy.

At 2,400dpi the HP took two minutes and 30 seconds to scan a single negative, which is acceptable. Our first transparency scans had somewhat dingy and inaccurate colours and we had to tweak the default settings to improve the results - and they still didn't seem especially sharp.

The ScanJet 4070 isn't as highly specified as other, cheaper scanners and, despite an original design, its film scanning isn't up to scratch.