Review: HP ScanJet 7450C

David Dorn looks at HP's new range of flatbed scanners and sees a goodly selection of kit

Product	ScanJet 7400C series Flatbed Scanners
Company	Hewlett Packard
Web	www.hp.co.uk
Price	£365 (£428.87) (7490C is £524 (£615.59)) (7400C is £280 (£329))
We like
We don't like
Rating	7450C 9/10 7400C 8/10 7490C 7/10
Requirements

HP has a new family of scanners in the market, and they're optimised for speed and amazingly high resolutions. The 7400 series of flatbed scanners each feature a twin-resolution CCD sensor, with a top optical resolution of 2400 dots per inch (dpi). For speed, though, there's another section of the sensor that scans at 600dpi - and much more quickly than the 2400dpi part. Since most folk rarely scan a photographic print at much above 300dpi anyway, you'd think that the 600dpi but would be all you'd need, but you might just be surprised.

The base model 7400C is, aside from the twin resolution CCD, pretty much a flatbed scanner that has a transparency adapter. Its two more capable siblings, though, come complete with an automatic document feeder that can handle up to 50 sheets of A4.

The sheet feeder is, doubtless, of use for OCR work, for which HP supplies ReadIris 6.0, and while we couldn't make it quite live up to its claims of OCRing an A4 document into Word in under 50 seconds (it actually took 55 seconds), it's certainly capable of handling multi-sheet OCR work quite happily.

The 2400dpi resolution comes into its own on all three machines for tranny scanning. In truth, you can pretty much guarantee that you'll get a better image from either a negative or a slide than you'll get from scanning a photo, and the transparency adapter allows you to use either very easily. In effect, all it is is a calibrated light and a selection of templates into which to place your slides or negative strips. The Precision Pro scanning drivers allow you to tweak resolution and scaling to your heart's content, although in photo (as opposed to slide) mode, it's pretty insistent that you want to use a very low resolution and scale, rather than the preferred "scan it at the resolution you'll print it" method of exacting highest possible quality.

Nevertheless, it handles both slide and negatives very well, and maintains good colour matching in the process. The adapter itself can prove a little unwieldy to store, especially on a crowded desk, and I've got to opine that a little cradle to hold it when it isn't in use would be a godsend.

Front Panel

HP makes much of its one-touch scanning to applications in its blurb for the 7400C series, and it's true to say that, unlike many other scanners I've seen, its buttons actually do work pretty reliably. In the test kit I've received, there were three different face plates included, each with a different language set, so the scanners will cater for everybody. The buttons themselves are soft-setable, so you can call whatever application you desire with each of the buttons - I'd suggest setting the "scan to email" to something other than your email package, please! In use, though, once you've got them set the way you want them, these front panel buttons do actually make life easier, and the informative LCD panel set squarely amidships often shows useful information.

Speed

I'm used to seeing a pre-scan take quite a time on the majority of lower cost scanners I've seen, but the dual-res CCD flips into 600dpi mode to present the pre-scan image in under 5 seconds - once it's warmed up, that is. If you're scanning at over 600dpi, then the 2400 dpi part takes over, and scan times rise. Even then, scanning a frame of 35mm film at 2400 dpi takes well under a minute and produces good quality (if large) files, at 48 bit colour depth, which is, in my opinion, a bit of overkill, given that many bitmapping packages can't handle such esoteric colour depths. Still, better too capable than not capable enough.

Quite which of the three variants you'd want to go for depends on the uses you could put it to. At the base level, the 7400C, without the sheet feeder, is priced quite competitively for a 2400dpi native scanner, and is easy to use and capable. The addition of the sheet feeder in the 7450C makes it a good choice for the office environment where archival of paper documents may take a starring role. The 7490C, though, adds software - Corel Draw 9 - and a SCSI card to an otherwise capable package, and is probably only likely to be of interest if you already have neither already. On balance, the 7400C would be my choice for anyone whose needs don't include multi-document scanning, and the 7450C for those that do.

 

 

Dave Dorn