HP Scanjet 7650

When it’s possible to buy a scanner for £25, why would anyone want to spend well over ten times as much? HP’s approach to the 7650 has been to pack in as many features as possible to give it a competitive edge. But the price has risen accordingly, and £400 is a lot to pay for a unit, even one with such a comprehensive feature set. 

Inside the box is a hefty A4 glass bed with a top-mounted auto document feeder unit. Unusually, the top and the bottom sections have to be connected by hand. Installation is simple, with excellent handholding from the set-up software, which even includes details such as the best way to orientate the cables to make sure they plug straight into their sockets correctly. 

The supplied software includes basic drivers for the TWAIN imaging standard (slow but flexible) and ISIS (fast but less comprehensive), HP’s Image Zone filing system and editor, and Adobe Photoshop Elements 2. 

The package also comes bundled with a document management suite, which includes PaperPort Deluxe and OmniForm. These are all good applications, but not very relevant to creative use. Image Zone includes simple operations such as rotation and red-eye removal, but there are no specialised scan correction or retouching features. Elements includes some of these, but for best results you’ll need Photoshop CS. 

Basic colour scanning is pretty good, with reasonably accurate colours and a virtual resolution up to 9,600dpi. The system is designed to be tough, so you can scan objects as well as photos without needing to be too careful. However, there are no built-in calibration options. 

The biggest let-down, though, is slide and negative scanning. A transparency holder is included, but unlike other scanners that can compensate for front lighting from under the scan bed, this is a large, handset-shaped external unit. The unit includes an alignment tray for positioning on the glass bed, but this is not only awkward to use – taking up a fair volume of desk space – it’s also slow, with a tedious pre-scan preparation routine. 

More worryingly, the results from film scanning are disappointing. Resolution is reasonable, but colour accuracy is poor, with an obvious blue shift. The software also lacks the intelligence needed to batch scan-selected images from a negative strip or slide group. This makes it practical for quick scans, but it can’t be recommended for heavy-duty studio scan sessions. 

Overall, if you need high-quality slide scanning there are plenty of more convenient and cheaper alternatives. And while the paper scanning here is good, it’s possible to find similar results for a good deal less than the cost of this package. In fact, HP seems to have pitched this as a business scanner that has creative applications, rather than vice versa. As such it’s not a bad product, but it’s difficult to recommend it as a first choice.