8 out of 8 people found this review helpful.
Hardware Good For Price Point, but Bad Software
Date of Review: Mar 7, 2007
The Bottom Line: Product is now discontinued. Good for occasional use if you can get one for a very cheap price. Avoid for high usage, or large projects.
I purchased the HP 3970 as a refurbished unit, although it appeared be new since it came in the original packaging (maybe overstock/clearance from HP?), a couple of years ago for an extremely low price. It replaced an ancient Plustek 9600 scanner.
There is a bug in the installation software. If you do not accept the default file locations, and specify a name with a space in it, eg. "HP 3970", it will fail. It took me a couple of hours to finally find a posting on the Internet by someone who had run into the same problem. This type of bug is really inexcusable for a company like HP.
I found the scan quality for photos at 600dpi and higher to be of pretty good quality - colours were reasonably accurate and every dust speck and scratch gets (unfortunately) faithfully captured at a reasonable speed. Compared to the Plustek, it is fast. But compared to other recent scanners, it is probably only average. I got around to scanning just a few 35mm prints and slides, due to lack of time. The capture for these looked only OK, but I did not get a chance to play with the settings much. It is noisy unit, but tolerable.
However, as other reviews point out, the software is truly brain damaged. Each time you import a scan into an application like Photoshop CS2, you must wait for the scanner lamp to warmup even though you just did a scan only seconds ago, and you must reconfigure the defaults. There is no way to change the defaults. While you can save settings, they must be reselected every time. This is extremely frustrating.
At any rate, the 3970 is now making loud grinding noises after about 2 years of light duty due to the transport seek/reset failing. Scanning no completes reliably or just produces garbage. I now have my order in for an Epson 4490 to replace it. From other reviews I have read, the 4490 promises faster scan speeds, higher resolution, batch scanning of up to 12 35mm frames or 4 slides, and wait for it now ..... a great software user interface. Can't wait.
I had considered the new HP G4050, but reviews mentioned that the software still has not been updated. So the new hardware performance improvements are crippled by the same old software. No thanks.
