Unlimited long distance $24.99/mo
Even when set to fully automatic mode, the HP driver can be a bit confusing to use. It's never quite clear how the interface operates and how the different settings interact. For example, if you choose the Adaptive Lighting adjustment, it should, in theory, change or disable any modifications you made with the Highlight, Shadow, and Midtone controls, or at least indicate what parts of the image each affects. Furthermore, Adaptive Lighting has a slider that defaults to 25. It's not clear what happens when you slide away from that--does it change the strength of the algorithm (weaker/stronger), or make it brighter or darker, or change the radius of the pixels it processes, or what? Though you can save settings, it reverts to the defaults after every scan, and you can't change defaults for resolution and scaling. I also encountered some glitches involving TWAIN, the interface between the image-processing software and the scanner. Most notably, batch scanning doesn't seem to work via Photoshop, though it works from the bundled Photosmart Premier software.
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 200dpi, for an output size of 4x5--takes about a minute. There's some overhead, however: it takes about 33 seconds for the scanner to warm up. Turning on autoexposure 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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HP Scanjet G4050:
