Customer Reviews

HP ScanJet 5300Cse Flatbed Scanner

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

The Hewlett Packard ScanJet 5300Cse is a great high-end scanner with 1200-dpi optical resolution, fast scan speeds, and high quality results. I scanned an 8x10 color photo earlier today in less than 45 seconds! The images are very sharp and coloration is true to the original. The 1200-dpi resolution gives you the capability to enlarge your pictures with amazing detail. I also found the copy function to be useful, just push a button on the front of the 5300C and a copy prints out of your printer seconds later. This scanner is fast, easy to use, and capable of the highest resolution scans... overall it's one of the best on the market and I highly recommend it!

For the casual home user, this is a great scanner. For scanning photograhs to e-mail and for importing images for greeting cards, brochures, and so on, this scanner is just fine. Scanning time is fairly quick. The software allows you to manipulate images to try and improve a photo or cut and paste one photo with another to create an entirely new image. For text, I would not recommend this scanner. Even top-line scanners have trouble with text, so don't expect great character recognition from this low-end model. Again, for the casual home user, you can't do much better than the 5300Cse; it does what most people want a scanner to do and it does it well.

This scanner is one of the best for it's price. I just picked one up about two weeks ago for my home office and it's been a very good buy so far. The scanner itself is very easy to use, and the software helps a lot. No matter what you need the scanner for, it works very nicely and is a great addition to any home and/or office. I highly reccomend it.

I have Windows ME and have had no problem setting up or using my scanner. I has a quick scan time and provides better than expected photograph quality. The character recognition occasionally mixes a few words up, hence the 4 star rating. I am satisfied with it and my other HP products.

I had the scanner installed up and running on Windows ME in less than 30 minutes. Mind you, I've never before owned a computer much less a scanner. My computer setup is also HP. This works great and does everything I want it to. And, it is user friendly. Very easy to use. Thanks HP.

I got this scanner two weeks ago & it has been great. It took 20 minutes to install the scanner software & hook up the scanner. Very good quality, & mediocre character recognition. Scans in photo quality so it looks just like the original picture. The 4 buttons on the front make for easy access to all scanner options. It can also scan directly to the web, printer, fax, or photo program. Overall a very good scanner with very good features

My biggest problem with this scanner is that it has no software to adjust the picture (contrast, color, size, etc) in any way, except trimming, either prior to or after scanning. You can't even rotate the picture! Most times this is just an annoyance because you have to open another image-editing program to do even the simplest thing. It comes with the shareware version of Adobe Photodeluxe Business Edition (which is weak even in the full form) to do this, which is acceptable for simple jobs. When the scanner converts to jpeg the image looks hideous (but this scanner is the only software I've seen to do it so poorly), so you must manually change the file from bmp to jpeg/etc for every single picture.

BUT, this becomes more than just an annoyance if you're scanning art. There are only two options for contrast prior to scanning: 'auto-sharpen image' or 'don't sharpen'. If you don't sharpen, every image looks muddy, awful, and unacceptable. If you sharpen, images with shading look awful. (it turns a softly shaded section into hideous patches of color) IMPORTANT: You can not fix this in any image editor! I have Adobe Photoshop, the industry standard image editor costing hundreds of dollars. I've tried to decrease contrast and increase brightness, scale down the picture slightly with bicubic resampling, and use the blur filter. I've also tried scanning it larger and shrinking it later. Nothing works!

Colored or B/W pencil works end of looking the worst. It's not that you just lose some of the original's quality, it's that they look awful. I wish I could show you an example but no links are allowed in reviews.

Don't get this scanner if you're an artist or if you're concerned about quality. If you're only scanning photos, it's okay, because the effect on photos is barely noticable.

I purchased a 5300 primarily to manipulate text. However, the optical character recognition feature is so poor that trying to correct just the spelling on one page of typewritten text takes way too much time. For example it picked up the word 'this' as 't!Jis' which is so poor a rendition that the spell checker was unable to recommend a replacement. Additionally it imagines things that are not on the page. It averaged twenty such errors per page. Don't buy this product for text manipulation!

Installation is not trouble free. Maybe it will work, maybe it will not. Have two computers with W2K and managed to get it going on one. While trying to find out what might have gone wrong I uninstalled the scanning software, installed it again and now I have a scanner software that will not work in either computers.

First I tried the HP's Knowledge Data Base where you will find only obvious topics like: "Check that all cables are properly connected" and so on. I tried e-mail support and it takes two days to get an answer. The support personnel at customer care does not know Windows 2000, their experience is limited to Windows 98.

On other matters HP's quality is good, but scanning speed is slow compared to lower-priced Agfa, UMAX and Microtek scanners (maybe due to the scanning software). Even if you have the extra buck to buy 3rd party scanning software to control the HP ScanJet line I would not recommend it.

Very disappointing product for HP's reputation.

This is a great quality scanner for scanning anything from photos to documents. I highly reccommend it!