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| HP ScanJet 6250C | |
 We recently needed a
new scanner for a HotDocs form project. Scanners have long held great promise in the law
office. The thought of responding to interrogatories without retyping a single word of an
adversary invariably puts a smile on the face of attorney and legal secretary alike. In
the past, however, those with a low tolerance for high cost and high frustration have
avoided imaging technology; it simply did not work as advertised. But, like so many things
in the information technology realm, scanners have gotten better and cheaper. Our pick,
the Hewlett-Packard ScanJet 6250C, blew us away. We received this high-resolution color scanner with a 25-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) ready for business. An ADF works like the feeder on a copying machine. It's indispensable when scanning in lengthy documents. It took about 25 seconds per page to scan a nine-page test document. So far, we're pleased we opted for this model over the HP ScanJet 6200C (the sans-ADF model) and other less expensive alternatives from various vendors. To borrow from a once popular saying, no one gets fired for buying Hewlett-Packard. The 6250C also comes equipped with a traditional SCSI interface (card and cable not included) as well as the new Universal Serial Bus (USB) interface. We connected our scanner to a Windows 98 system with USB ports rather than do battle with SCSI. It took all of five minutes to install the software off CD-ROM (drivers and bundled third-party applications), shut down, connect the USB cable to the USB port, then reboot. Windows 98 found the hardware and did the rest. "Plug-n-play" may finally have arrived. The scanner is Twain compliant, meaning just about any optical character recognition (OCR), faxing, graphics or imaging program can find it and use it. Most of these programs cause Windows to launch HP's Precision Scan Pro scanning software (it can also run on its own). More powerful than previous HP scanning tools like Deskscan II, it is also more complex. Thankfully, HP included the ScanJet coach to help newcomers through the process step-by-step. Precision Scan Pro first shows a preview of the item you're scanning. It automatically selects an output format of the preview for you based on what it detects (color, grayscale, etc.), but you can override the choice from the output menu. We especially liked the ability to choose the output as text -- it will then use the built-in OCR software to convert the image to text so that you can paste into your word processor. You can do much more than just look at the provided preview. Those familiar with photo applications will find the familiar tools that let you adjust contrast, brightness and so forth. But that's just the beginning. Suppose, for example, you wanted to include a portion of a photograph of the accident scene in a motion. You would place the photo on the scanner's glass, fire up Scan Pro, then just highlight the previewed portion you want and drag and drop it to your word processor. The software does a final scan of the selected region and pastes the results into your document. I can't see how it could be easier. Likewise, you could arrange several pictures on the glass at once and select and scan them individually. With the emergence of sub-$2,000 network-ready color laser printers (e.g., Tektronix Phaser 740) and scanners like this, last minute (and costly) runs to Kinko's might soon be a thing of the past. Some other utilities also caught our fancy. Using ScanJet Copy, you can send a copy of whatever is on the scanner to your printer, making it a handy, albeit slow, copier. This, however, pales in comparison with another feature we never expected to find in such an inexpensive scanner: the ability to share the scanner on the network. Unlike a true network scanner, you can't scan something at the scanner and with the press of a few keys have it delivered via e-mail to your desk. You can, however, access this scanner remotely, provided the host and the remote computers run the utility software. Your applications think it is connected to your PC. Like the initial installation, this took just a few minutes to get going. The 6250C also comes with various bundles of third-party software. Our bundle included: Adobe PhotoDeluxe Business Edition (a photo editing tool), faxSav and faxLauncher (Internet fax tools), Caere PageKeeper Standard (a low-end image management tool) and a trial version of Caere's OmniPage Pro (OCR software). Finally, while the glass on the 6250C measures only 8.5 inch x 11 inch, it scans legal-size pages too, via the ADF. We would like to see HP offer a similarly priced model with a full 8.5 inch x 14 inch glass, as we had mixed results, namely because less than perfect originals were not pulled in perfectly straight. In the end, we concluded that the 6250C is an impressive combination of hardware and software, destined to find a place at many solo, small- and medium-sized practices. |
Hewlett-Packard Co. (800) 722-6538 www.hp.com PC $499 Reviewed by Alan S. Adler, president, CompCounsel Inc., New York, N.Y. PROS CONS VERDICT
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