A real "Scan" Artist

HP ScanJet 5p another winner

Hewlett Packard has done it again.

They’ve come up with a well-built, quality color scanner that does just about everything the home office owner could want or need. And best of all, they’ve kept the price down: the new ScanJet 5p is a very good value.

We’d played with – and liked – the 4p before, so we weren’t surprised that the 5p is a good unit. Its only real shortcoming compared with the 4p is that it’s only capable of scanning letter size documents (the 4p could take legal pages), but that means it’s still okay for about 95% of the jobs for which you’d need it.

That said, wouldn’t you know we had to scan from an automotive brochure and it was a "coffee table book" size that was too big for the 5p’s bed. It took some juggling, but we managed.

The ScanJet comes with its own Plug and Play SCSI card and occupies an ISA slot inside your PC. The SCSI has a new type of connector that’s smaller than others we’ve used, so we needed a special adapter cable to use our other SCSI stuff. Fortunately, such a beast was readily available locally.

Installation and setup are straightforward, and the Windows 3.1/95 CD-ROM contains both the scanner and the Visioneer PaperPort software that accompanies it.

A word of advice: if you’re installing under Windows 95, let the software install itself to whatever directory it wants. We installed it under "Program Files," and it forgot all its shortcuts. So if we used the "Start" menu to access the scanner, it got confused and begged for help finding itself.

So much for artificial intelligence.

When we reinstalled it using the defaults, however, it worked fine.

Aside from that, we really liked this scanner, and its relatively small footprint, for a flatbed, fit nicely onto the desktop – which couldn’t be said for the 4p.

Using the machine is a breeze. As with most scanners, you can scan directly into most of the software you’d want to, and if you’re scanning into PaperPort and redirecting it from there (to the OCR, fax software, or word processor, for example) you just press the big green button on the front of the scanner and it leaps obediently into action.

The OCR software is Caere’s OmniPage Lite and it does a good job.

The ScanJet 5p gives you 1200 dpi enhanced resolution (300 dpi optical) and you can set it to scan for anything from screen resolution to 1200 dpi printers – though the latter setting makes for horrendously large file sizes!

All in all, HP’s ScanJet 5p is a well built unit (though we don’t think it’s as sturdy as its predecessor – not that you’ll be using it as a Little League team’s home plate!) and performs very well.

It makes a wonderful addition to the home office – and we didn’t want to send it back.

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