Description: Photosmart Premier for HP Scanjet 4850 Photo Scanner Type: Driver This download is the full HP Photosmart software (V 7.0) for the HP Scanjet 4800 series of scanners and all Windows Operating Systems. NOTE: This is an extremely large file (over 220 MB) that, depending on your connection type and speed, may take many hours to download. Jul 31, 2008 HP Scanjet 4850 software by jimdwest Jul 30, 2008 5:52AM PDT Is there any software available, other than HP, that will do simple scans with the HP ScanJet 4850.
HP Scanjet 4890 Photo Scanner
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Pros
- Scans 35mm, medium-format, and 4- by 5-inch film, documents, and photographic prints.
- Fast performance, particularly for film.
Cons
- Low scan quality.
- Good only for printing scans at snapshot quality.
Bottom Line
With HP Scanjet 4890 Photo Scanner, working with film and photographic prints is easy, but scan quality lacks.
The HP Scanjet 4890 Photo Scanner ($199.99 direct) is the best argument we've seen lately for never buying a scanner based on the big numbers shouting from the box. The claimed 4,800 pixel-per-inch (ppi) optical resolution and 48-bit color depth promise excellent results for both photographic prints and slides. The reality doesn't meet the promise. Photos will scan well enough to print at snapshot quality, but far short of what a serious amateur shutterbug would want.
Ironically, although 'photo' is in the scanner's name, the 4890 does well on almost everything but. It comes with both Twain and WIA drivers, so you can scan from most Microsoft Windows programs that support the capability. And the Twain driver deserves praise for both being easy to use and offering reasonably good control over scan settings. You can, for example, modify color saturation, tint, and brightness and have separate brightness adjustments for highlights, shadows, and midtones.
The other included software is also impressively easy. Start a scan from HP's Solution Center, and it will launch the Twain driver with appropriate settings for the type of scan you picked—a photographic print, document, or film. You can easily change the settings for a given original as needed and can redefine the defaults for the future simply by making changes and marking a check box.
To use the software's integrated optical character recognition (OCR), you only have to select a text format for the output file. Choices include RTF and searchable PDF, which gives the package some (highly limited) document-management capability, although that, as well as OCR capabilities are limited by the lack of an automatic document feeder. Accuracy was reasonably good, though: We got no errors reading Times New Roman text at 10 points and Arial text at 8. The flatbed can accept originals up to 8.5-by-12.25 inches.
The 4890 makes the mechanics of scanning film—both positives (such as slides) and negatives—surprisingly easy. There are three included templates: one for up to 16 35mm slides, one for 5 strips of 35mm film, and one for 120 and 220 medium-format and 4- by 5-inch film. To scan, you simply remove the mat from the top cover to reveal the transparency adaptor, place the template on the flatbed, and put the film in the template.
In our tests with 35mm slides, the software did an excellent job of finding each slide and scanning it into its own file. For slides, this was also by far the fastest flatbed scanner we've seen—it took just 26 seconds, at 2,400 by 2,400 ppi, for one slide. Most flatbed scanners take over twice as long.
Unfortunately for the 4890, quality, not speed, is the most important concern with photos, and that's where this scanner stubs its toe badly. On our standard 2,400-ppi slide test, it simply didn't deliver the level of detail it should have for the claimed resolution. The output was blurry compared with the 2,400-ppi results from less-expensive models, notably the
The 4890 also loses more detail in dark areas than the 8400F and 3490, which is another way to say that its dynamic range—the ability to distinguish subtle differences in shading from white to black—isn't as good as you'd expect for the claimed 48-bit color depth. On a particularly hard-to-scan slide, much of a dark tree line that was against a bright sky became a solid mass of black. On less challenging slides, the scanner did an acceptable job.
Surprisingly, the 4890 also had some problems with photographic prints, which don't need the same bit depth or level of resolution as film. One scan showed obvious streaks along a side—apparently the result of light leaking in along the edge of the scanner cover, since they disappeared when we moved the photo to a different position. But if you're scanning a large photo or several at once, changing the position may not be an option.
The 4890 scans of images on photo paper were acceptable if you just want to print scans as snapshots. But compared with the Epson 3490 and 3590 in particular, the 4890's scans lost more detail in bright areas, such as white-on-white detail in a wedding dress. Given that the two Epson printers and the Canon 8400F are less expensive and offer better quality, there's simply no good reason to choose the HP Scanjet 4890 Photo Scanner unless you find it at a drastically reduced price.
Check out the HP Scanjet 4890 alongside other scanners in our
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