Entered CNET Catalog: 01/08/2004
SKU: 0808736552165
Manufacturer: HP
Manufacturer description
The HP ScanJet 5530 Photosmart scanner scans up to 24 photos in less than 5 minutes - all with true-to-life results - at 2400 x 4800-dpi hardware resolution and 48-bit color. You can even scan your negatives and slides with the included adapter. Easily convert boxes of photos into scans for use within photo album pages, to share via email, or on CD with music and more. And restoring faded photos is a snap using the one-touch automatic photo-correction feature - for image quality that rivals the original.Product summary
The good: Scans stacks of photos effortlessly; offers good photo and color-graphic scans; fast opaque scans.
The bad: Huge footprint; unintuitive setup; exceedingly slow translucent scans.
The bottom line: If you need to scan lots of photos and negatives--and you have plenty of desktop space--the Scanjet 5530 is a good choice.
Editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- Reviewed on: 02/12/2004
Hewlett-Packard's Scanjet 5530 Photosmart scanner offers an array of features to help you start digitizing your photo collection; and with a price tag of about $230, this printer falls about midrange in the consumer-scanner category. It's a good deal for anyone who needs to plow through hundreds of photos quickly. But before you pull out your pocketbook, take note of the free space on your desktop: this scanner is a veritable Goliath among its peers, measuring 19 inches long, 12 inches wide, and 5.5 inches tall. If you don't have heaps of photos to scan, the Scanjet 5530's features don't balance out its price and massive bulk; check out Visioneer's OneTouch 7300 USB instead.
The Scanjet 5530 may be a giant--and like its cousins, the Scanjet 3670 and the Scanjet 3970, its body is none too svelte--but it has a solid, functional design nonetheless. Clearly labeled buttons on the front of the machine allow for direct photo or text scanning, copying in black and white or color, sharing to e-mail, and uploading scanned images to the Web. Plus, there's a nifty little display that lets you choose how many copies to make in Copy mode. The Scanjet 5530's lid is typical of other HP scanners' in that its convenient sliding hinges accommodate books or albums. However, the lid uniquely integrates an automatic document feeder, which allows you to align stacks of up to 24 photos for expedient one-touch scanning. The scanner also comes with a separate Transparent Material Adapter (TMA) for scanning slides and 35mm negatives.
A clear, step-by-step instruction sheet makes setting up the scanner fairly easy. The one exception is a fluorescent-green cardboard piece that comes fitted to the underside of the lid. Diligent searching of the user manual and the installation disc provided no clues as to what to do with it, though, so we e-mailed HP's tech support and soon had our answer: throw it away. Like most HP scanners, the Scanjet 5530 comes with HP Photo & Imaging software, a no-frills photo- and image-editing app that won't impress serious photo enthusiasts. You also get ArcSoft's Collage Creator software, a truly fun application that lets you juice up and mix up your photos. A full-year warranty and 24/7 free tech support top off the package.
When tested for performance, the Scanjet 5530 offered mixed results. The scanner demonstrated better-than-average performance on opaque scans, materializing full-page color scans in 17.2 seconds and full-page grayscale in 16.3 seconds. (The average times for the last 10 speed-tested scanners are 28.7 seconds and 20.1 seconds, respectively.) Translucent scans, however, were painfully slow: slide scans finished in 76.3 seconds--the past average is 31.1 seconds--and negative scans took a whopping 315.9 seconds compared to a past average of 64.6 seconds.
Overall, the Scanjet 5530 offers high-quality image reproduction. Scanned color photos and graphics came out crisp and clear and showed excellent color matching and detail. The scanner also beautifully reproduced black-and-white photos, although we did notice some noise across the image when the original was a matte print. The negative that we scanned showed all of the detail and the color clearly and correctly. Scanned grayscale graphics, however, displayed flawed recognition of some close-set lines and dots, making some straight lines appear curved and creating a crisscross pattern in dot sets. Plus, the scanner didn't catch subtle changes between different whites and blacks at the far ends of the grayscale. The slide we scanned in our test came through slightly blurry and with a very minor tinge of yellow.
User opinions
Select a User Opinion to view: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11out of 11 user reviews
done the business
Pros: bomb proff
Cons: sometimes plays up
out of 11 user reviews
Lasted only 1.5 years.
Pros: At the time I bought this it was the best option for scanning slides. It also does a good job of OCR when scanning documents.
Cons: The auto feed, slide holder, scanning process is slow, the software is OK.
out of 11 user reviews
Big Disapointment in HP ... Terrible Product
Pros: Hand Scanning does a decent job
Cons: Feeder does not work, terrible software, feed scans are blurry
out of 11 user reviews
Stay away from this piece of junk
Pros: scan quality
Cons: feeder doesn't work right, crops photos wrong, awful software, poor support.
And the HP scanning software could have been written by 12 monkeys during their lunch break...it's horrendous! There is no excuse for a company with the expertise and experience that HP has to produce software with such a poor interface, and it doesn't even work right. I don't know how many times I spent an hour baby-feeding photos through the scanner, only to find out it didn't save a single, solitary image. Where the @%$!* are they??? It somehow managed to rename some of my other images, though, that I had saved on my hard drive...what the **!?? I searched all over the web for reviews and comments on this torture device, and anybody whose actually used it for any length of time and tried to get help from HP got bupkis! This thing is defective and HP should step up to the plate and give buyer's their money back or something that works like it says it will on the box!
out of 11 user reviews
Very poor software, automatic photo feeder is for nothing
Pros: Quick scanner
Cons: The HP software is absolutly unusable
out of 11 user reviews
Great Hardware - inexplicably bad software
Pros: APF makes scanning lots of photos quick and easy. Good quality hardware. Good scanning speed when scanning opaque images.
Cons: Somewhat slow on Negatives/Slides. Loses all images in a set when an error occurs. Software - AWFUL, is HTML/XML based crap, written for Windows 98, that relies on Internet Explorer to operate. The software needs to be dropped and rewritten from the groun
out of 11 user reviews
bad job with offsize photos
Pros: easy to use product, good quality, great with 4x6 photos
Cons: noisy. had over 100 of 4x5 custom size photos. the scanner seems to only like standard size photos (ie 4x6). automatically crops off the bottom of the picture to make it standard size. the saved profile feature only works on the last picture in a stac
out of 11 user reviews
Concept is good needs improvement
Pros: Batch scanning is a great concept for storage of photos.
Cons: Tends to jam and loose the batch in the middle of a scan. The software needs improvement for correcting photo defects. Wish we had better control of sizing images.
out of 11 user reviews
Tragic flaw: the software
Pros: The Automatic Photo Feeder would work for me if the software wasn't so poorly designed and developed. Unique product.
Cons: I bought this scanner with the Automatic Photo Feeder so I could digitize my grandparents' photo albums and create a present for my mother. It was a huge mistake. - 1) The APF is not usable. 2) The scanning interface is abysmal. (actually a script runnin
out of 11 user reviews
Terrible image quality
Pros: scanning a stack of photos
Cons: bought one online, installed the software and hardware, no problems. scanned some photos and the quality was horrible. all the photos liked dusty and dirty. checked photos and scanner glass. all where clean. contacted hp support, after an hour on the p
out of 11 user reviews
Junk hardware, poor software
Pros: It comes with automatic photo feeder.
Cons: Quality control is awful. My first scanner came with the mirrors misaligned; the second one produce a rainbow of colors and white spots all over (due to some hardware problem). With my third one, HP support admitted that there were some bugs in the soft
