HP ScanJet 2300c Flatbed Scanner

All HP Scanjets, EXCEPT HP Scanjet 2300c, are equipped with an exclusive combination of two sensors: Staggered pixel CCD and Tri-linear CCD.

Also...

Long story, short: In a period of exactly 2 years, I've seen two HP Scanjet 2300c scanners fail due to hardware issues. My original newly-bought HP Scanjet 2300c couldn't slide the moving device under the glass all the way after less than a year. A year after that, the refurbished HP Scanjet 2300c replacement, sent by HP to replace the original, had a lamp failure, causing heavily faded images with green tint. HP tech support also suggested interference with other electronics near the scanner (speakers, monitors, computer...).

Perhaps I was terribly unlucky. The HP Scanjet 2300c had excellent quality...when it worked. But reliability and lifespan are both important as well.

I have used mine not only for making copies of documents but also to scan coins (e.g.- for sale on eBay). It works great! The top cover can be easily raised an inch or so for larger objects. Speed and scan quality have been fine for my purposes.

Where is the zero star???? Every HP product I have ever own sucked. We used to buy HP inkjet printers and after one would break, we would buy another one to replace it. Talk about stupid. Finally replaced it with a Canon i950. Absolutely no problem. So I see this HP scanner for sale and I decide to give HP another try and I buy it. All the scans have a freaking vertical blue line intersecting every scan. Piece of sh*t scanner. I returned it the next day and vowed to never ever buy another HP product.

Good scanner, decent software.

The scanner itself is lightweight and somewhat small, though it is not intended for space-saving. It's not bulky like most Visioneer models, but it's not slim, either. The one problem I have with the scanner itself is that the top often slides off when I don't intend it to, and it's annoying to have to put the little hinges back into the scanner.

The quality is okay; it's not something I'd use to scan pictures and expect them to be all perfect quality, but I scan art with this scanner, and for that purpose it is sufficient. It's not meant for something professional, and for the price it is well worth it.

As far as the software goes... the people complaining that it makes their computers freeze probably have a technical problem with their computers, not the actual scanner or the scanner software. Problems such as this could easily be fixed if people had the incentive to actually learn a little something about computers, instead of expecting the entire digital world to work with the simplicity and "user friendly" ease of AOL or Windows XP. It'd be nice if all of the digital world did work like that, but the real world doesn't, either. Sometimes it's a simple problem such as a driver incorrectly installed or the wrong driver installed (which, in most cases, is the USER's fault) and people spend months struggling with their computers going haywire. Then they end up complaining that it's the company's fault, when a lot of times I'm just seeing it's the innate inability for some humans to interact with technology. I'm just a little tired of seeing good products get bad reviews and bad ratings because people don't know how to work with technology.

Tangent aside, this is pretty much a good scanner with decent software (personally, I prefer importing the images through Adobe, but, whatever).

Don't buy this scanner.
Though the hardware is reasonable at the price (but mine malfunctions if placed too close to the computer), the software is truly the worst software of any type that I have seen in recent years. The software has infuriating problems such as refusing to scan an image of standard dimensions unless I preview every scan. As a result this scanner is very hard and very slow to use for scanning printed documents intended to send to an OCR package. I was expecting it to be slow but it is unspeakably slow because the software is VERY slow to laod and initialize and many of the software features can't be used and workarounds are needed at every turn. I was trying to use it on an 800MHz Windows 98 computer. The updated drivers on the HP web site are in some ways worse than the older ones. When you've wrestled with it for an hour to scan in a simple 15 page document you will get the idea. Best avoided if you can find any alternative.