Color Scanner for Professionals

The Scanjet 7450c, HP’s latest color scanner for professional scanning work, supports a maximum hardware resolution of 2,400x2,400 dpi with 48-bit color. It also gives dual connectivity options in the form of a USB port and a mini 50-pin SCSI port. The SCSI interface is useful for scanning at high resolutions, when the file size might be large. But you need to buy a SCSI card separately to use this interface.

The scanner comes with an ADF (automatic document feeder) of 50 pages capacity, which is great for scanning multiple pages. It can scan items with dimensions up to 8.5”x14”. It also has a Scanjet XPA adapter, which when attached can scan 35 mm negatives, slides, and transparencies up to 5”x5” in size. The scanner also has six quick-function buttons for e-mail, fax, copy, and edit tasks.

To check out the scanner we installed it using the USB port. It comes with a setup poster and drivers for Windows 98/Me/NT 4/2000 and Mac OS 8.5 and above. For a typical installation (PrecisonScan only) you need 114 MB, but the complete set of software takes up 489 MB hard disk space. The resolution at which you can scan, ranges from 200 dpi to 2,400 dpi.

The Scanjet 7450c also comes with good software including HP PrecisionScan Pro 3.0, IRIS Readiris Pro 6.0 OCR, Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.05, Corel Print Office 2000–a document and Web page creation application, Boomerang WebShop 2000–a website creation, publishing and management software, Caere Omniform for converting paper into electronic forms, IRIS Cardiris for scanning and archiving business cards, Emotion 3D Web Edition for creating 3D animations for Web pages and HP Remote Scanning for sharing the scanner on a network. It also has a separate set of applications for the Mac.

Scanning with the Scanjet 7450c is quite fast and gives impressive results. We scanned a postcard-sized photo in less than 8 seconds at 200 dpi with 16.7 million colors. We also did high-resolution scans with objects ranging from a small strand of hair to very detailed color photographs, and got impressive results. The lone downer for the scanner is that it is a bit noisy.

Overall, its rich features and good performance make it ideal for professionals who need quality scans.

Sachin Makhija at PCQ Labs