HP ScanJet 2400 Digital Flatbed Scanner > Reviews > My HP Scanjet 2400 Experience

Author's product rating:   

Speed	Slow
Colour sensitivity	Satisfactory
Resolution	Satisfactory
Ease of Installation	Poor - time consuming and not very logical
Value For Money	Good

Advantages:	Inexpensive
Disadvantages:	Not too user - friendly

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

My HP Scanjet 2400 experience began when I inserted the installation CD, this began to run and immediately stopped with a 'Macromedia Projector' error message. I presume 'Macromedia Projector' is software used to momentarily give a flashy display before the installation starts. Overkill that died!!! I am running Windows XP Service Pack 2 so my guess is that there was a conflict.

So I explored the CD, found the Setup files and ran these to install the software. I think this worked, although I have no idea if I got the full software set.

Next I tried to scan a series of A4 (paper size) documents as A4 documents using the HP Director control software. Could I do this? Not without a good deal of manual intervention because after each scan the scanner insisted on removing the margins and I had to manually drag them back into place. I tried reading the manual - no use. I tried an online chat with HP Tech Support but 'Shereen' didn't know the answer either! Eventually I discovered that you had to set the scan parameters you wanted then save the profile. Then alter the settings to load the saved parameters rather than the defaults. Finally, after about 2 hours I achieved A4 to A4 scans!

Next I tried the ReadIris Pro 8 Optical Character Recognition software that was bundled with the scanner. Low and behold, this could be used to interface directly with the scanner and had the A4 option which is missing from the basic scanner sofware! My documents were mostly text but with a bit of handwriting added. In default mode the software would try to convert everything to text but after a good deal of trial and error I chanced upon the discovery that I could switch the parts with handwriting to 'graphics' so these were unchanged whilst leaving the Character Recognition software to work on the remaining text. This worked pretty well and produced much smaller files than the .jpg files I had created using the scanner directly. Some niggles were that the software seemed to lose superscript and bold formatting and didn't reproduce the rather obscure font of the original. But I was still pretty impressed and maybe if I read the manual or practise some more I could do even better. I had no previous experience of this type of software and I didn't find it very intuive or easy to use - but I got lucky eventually.

So, my first impression is that I am pleased with the results but had to work very hard to achieve them. Because I managed to buy my scanner for less than £30 (at Staples) I can't complain about the value for money. I haven't had much prior experience of scanners so the criteria I rated as 'Satifactory' seem to me to be okay so far.