HP Scanjet G4050 Photo ScannerItem#: H24-L1957A  |  Model#: L1957A#B1H

good quality scanner

The Negatives to computer prints are washed out on some. may be the negatives. the photo scans are excellent. It's not a speedy scanner, but I was looking for quality and it has excellent quality scanning old photos.

Best value, bar none

As a professional photographer I reviewed all the major players in this price range before I bought this unit 5 years ago. I'm glad I did. Thousands of scans later, of both photos and transparencies, the unit has preformed admirably.

conflicts with HP Photosmart Printer

To My surprise HP has a conflict with its own products. Both units the HP Photosmart Printer and the HP Scanjet G4050 use the resource center and the Scanjet will only work on single photos. I have spent at least 20 hours with HP trying to get product to work. Currently niether product functions.....Waiting on tier 2 support!

Bought mine in june 2008

I'm still using mine, works just like the day I bought it. Wend from Windows xp pro to windows 7 and have not had any problems with the hardware. HP's software was a problem because they do not provide the right info on updating the software. Once you load the software correctly, the software works great. I think I've had and have this scanner long enough so I thought I would finally write my review!

Serviceable but slow

The scanner works fine, has useful features but if you have a large volume of slide pictures you will be at it for awhile. I found it takes approximately an hour to scan a hundred slides.

16 slides at a time and OCR was super

I bought this scanner instead of an expensive auto feeder slide scanner. It works great and I saved 1000.00. The machine is quiet and the software works well. Only glitch with the software is that the middle rows dont always show up, but you can get to them using the software (why not 5 stars). You can do 16 slides at a time. At higher resolution the time it takes to scan goes way up so you have to trade off picture size,quality vs time. The 300 dpi works really fast and the picture quality is grainy so you have to find a setting that works for you. Great product and it does legal size. I also scanned spanish literature and the ocr software worked great (better than my old 3 in 1). The software works on both my XP and windows 7 pc's. Best 200.00 spent.

Best Product (Scanner) for the Money

I needed a scanner that would copy my 40 year old larger black & white negatives. Also needed one that would copy my more recent 35mm color negatives and slides which were taken before digital technology arrived. I must say that the Product exceeded my expectations at every level, except two: The program would crash every time I tried to use the ''Crop'' function on negatives. Also, the program disk may have been corrupted (not completely load). My daughter downloaded an updated operation program from the. However, the Crop function was still a problem. The solution was to process the negatives without cropping them. I Used another program to crop the filed negatives.

Reviews are misleading !

While waiting for my scanner, I decided to research it. I was shocked at the negative user opinions of this scanner. I decided to send it back unopened before it arrived. It arrived the day my wife and daughters went out of town. I was bored and decided to open the box and play with it.It installed easily and performed great. I did photos, negatives and slides without a glitch.300 to 600 dpi scans were quick and scan software is easy to use. I rank it a 4 because this is the first day I used it. I noticrd when reading 90 different user reviews that most were posted 3-5 years ago. People who dont follow instrutions and have trouble need to blame someone. Its human nature.

can HP get their act together?

we received the scanner but that's it; no power cord, no usb cord, no slide holders as advertised, no software or manual. just a scanner in a beat-up box with broken Styrofoam. the Company is handling the exchange well. we'll see if the second one comes complete. should have listened to my gut to never buy HP.

Garbage

I bought this scanner so I could put our family's slide and photo collection on disk. I have worked with many scanners and MFPs over the years and this one is the absolute worst. The software is horrible; confusing, miserable auto-detect for photo sizes, and totally inconsistant. Some slides were completely omitted, for unknown reasons. It would sometimes just stop working. Having also purchased a Pavillion desktop that came with free upgrade to Windows7 I thought it would be clear sailing. Wrong. The same people that advertised and highlighted the upgrade - HP - are the same ones that never got around to building the Windows7 driver for the G4050! So now the thing doesn't work at all. Endless hours online with their tech ''support'' were nothing more than an exercise in futility. Since their piece of junk is now 100% useless I am going to try and return it to HP for another (workable) model. I am not going to get my hopes up. Wish me luck, and avoid this thing.