Scanners

HP Scanjet G4050

By admin ⋅ September 18, 2007 ⋅  Send this to a friend.. ⋅  Print this article. ⋅ Post a comment ⋅ Add to Technorati Favorites

The Hewlett-Packard Scanjet G4050 gives superior color accuracy and photo reproduction, thanks to its innovative 6-color, 96-bit scanning engine. It scans up to sixteen 35 mm slides or 30 negative frames, and also can scan other film sizes using a built-in adapter. Dust and scratches on the film are removed at the touch of a button, and faded color is corrected using the included software. The Scanjet G4050 even automatically removes red eye and enhances details in dark photos using HP Real Life technologies.

Performance ranges from decent to interminable. Scanning a page to PDF takes only about 30 seconds, although it appears about half of that is the time it takes Acrobat to launch. Two slides scanned at the default settings–400 percent scaling and 200 dpi, for an output size of 4×5–takes about a minute. There’s some overhead, however: it takes about 33 seconds for the scanner to warm up. Turning on auto exposure and bumping up to 4,800dpi (maximum optical resolution) at 100 percent scaling increases that to about 3.5 minutes per slide. I tried to pile on the works, including high resolution, dust and scratch removal, and six-channel scanning, but gave up timing when the first slide was only half done after 10 minutes–definitely a turn-it-on-and-go-to-lunch kind of operation. Keep in mind that these are on my oh-so-real-world work system, a 2.4GHz P4 with 1.25GB RAM, via a USB 2.0 connection. Your mileage may vary.

If you intend to digitize large quantities of slides and negatives, or have originals with serious dust and scratches, I’d steer clear of this model; it seems a suboptimal choice for both. For the occasional batches of positives and negatives, and frequent print scans, it’s a good deal for the money.

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