HP SCANJET 4670

It’s all very well having a great scanner, but if it’s bigger than your laptop, beige and prohibitively heavy, is it really the ideal device to have in a portable office situation? HP’s latest scanner revolts against the beige manifesto. Styled in silver and vertically mounted in its accompanying stand, it requires minimal desk space. The Scanjet looks more like a photo frame than a scanner with its clear window allowing you to see what you are scanning and whether or not it’s correctly aligned. Three buttons are tucked neatly on the side for quick operation of scanning, printing and emailing of larger items. You can remove the scanner from the stand and lay it flat on books or anything that will stay still long enough for the scanner to whiz into action.

For the more traditional user, the Scanjet4670 also comes with a compact Transparent Materials Adapter that attaches to the device for negatives and transparencies. Optical resolution is up to 2400 x 2400dpi with a maximum scan size of 216 x 297mm. Transferring the data is done using a USB 2.0 cable and installation is straightforward. Like most HP scanners, the Scanjet 4670 comes with HP Photo and Imaging software to get you started, which is a cumbersome and difficult package that made changing settings awkward. Under test, we found results to be good, although we have seen better on machines dedicated to the task.

Unexpectedly, the flatbed scanner provided better than the Transparent Materials Adapter, but due to the nature of transparencies, the Scanjet produced unsatisfactory results with large amounts of blurring and loss of contrast. When it came to using the scanner away from its stand with multiple images and text the Scanjet coped well, capturing all the detail from the photos, the print, the line drawings and the grain of the desk underneath in our test set up. At £179 (inc. VAT) this is an expensive scanner whose quality doesn’t really live up to the price. It’s obviously that you are paying for the style rather than scan quality. Although it does look very stylish sitting on the desk, for a lot less you can get a scanner that will produce a lot better results. Okay so it won’t look pretty, but then you it seems you can’t have everything.

RATING: 7
PRICE: £152/£179 (EX/INC. VAT)
REQUIREMENTS: USB 2.0
CONTACT: 08705 474747 WWW.HP.COM