Drop, charge, and lose the cords
CNET editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Good
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 08/15/2002
Although Hewlett-Packard's new Scanjet 3570c's $149 price is good for a high-quality consumer-level scanner, this product delivers mixed results. It generates attractive opaque scans from paper-based documents, including photographs, magazine pages, and text from books and business documents. But its scans of transparent media, such as slides and film, are low quality, and its performance is slow, making it suitable only for family snapshots or other casual use. If you want to digitize your vacation photos and slides, save money and get the 3570c. But keep shopping if you seek a bargain scanner for your business or for other high-capacity tasks.
Cons and conveniences
We must commend the 3570c for its cross-platform compatiblity. The 3570c connects to both Macs and PCs over USB 1.1 or 2.0. It supports all Windows versions starting with 98 and Mac OS 9.1 and up.
The Scanjet 3570c's design also offers some real advantages over that of many other scanners. To accommodate thick documents, the scanner's lid slides up on strong hinges or comes off completely. Better still, the backlight, which illuminates transparent media from above the glass, turns itself on automatically when you initiate a transparent scan; other scanners make this process more complicated. A grooved plastic strip above the backlight holds 35mm film carefully by the edges. Unfortunately, it isn't as careful with slides: it forces you to push the slide down into the same grooves, then hook your fingernail under the lip of the frame to pull out the slide, thus risking leaving fingerprints or scratches on the film.
Software on the side
Like all scanners, the 3570c comes with software that helps you run the scanner and manipulate your scans. HP's Photo & Imaging (P&I) software comes with the 3570c to provide a soup-to-nuts toolkit. Its Director module lets you launch a scan, then send it to a printer or directly to another application, such as Microsoft Word. P&I's limited Image Editor also performs basic photo-editing tasks, such as adjusting color balance or brightness and contrast. Send your scans to the Gallery module to produce banners, sticky labels, wallet-sized prints, and other projects.
The jury reaches a verdict
Here's the good news: CNET's image-quality jury found the Scanjet 3570c's opaque captures to be quite attractive. And now the bad news: its transparency scans don't look so hot. The opaque color scans display sharp focus and perfect geometry, though colors look a bit less saturated than they should. The 3570c also captures opaque grayscale images realistically and preserves contrasts well but introduces slight pixelization on fine detail. Slide scans, however, take on a slightly beige cast and soft focus; negatives also appear noticeably out of focus, with distorted colors, almost like ink wash graphics from before the days of offset printing.
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