Good little scanner (HP Scanjet 3300C)

Member Name: r_welfare

Product:	HP Scanjet 3300C
Date:	22/03/03 (830 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap

Disadvantages: Perhaps a little low-tech these days

A good few years ago, when I got into PCs in a big way (in the mid-1990s) I was impressed by the idea of a scanner. Here was an item (handheld in those days for most home users, looking a little bit like a flattened hairdryer!) that you could use to "grab" a photo or image in a magazine or book, transfer to your PC, and play about with to your heart's content.

I forget which colour hand scanner I bought way back then (a Genius, I think), and while it proved useful for adding pictures and diagrams to my A-level and university reports, it was low-quality, cumbersome to fit (requiring a dedicated expansion card to be fitted into my PC) and difficult to use properly. You had to line up the scanner with the (totally flat) image and drag it across at a constant speed. Often lights would flash to tell you you were going too fast, and all too often the image would end up garbled or skewed, and you had to start again.

Of course, over time the price of technology started to fall (as it always does with computers), and flatbed scanners became affordable to the home user.

In early 2001 I began to get addicted to eBay auctions, and quickly deduced that a scanned image of the item you were selling helped interest in the auction. So I bought a Hewlett Packard Scanjet 3300c from Simply Computers for about £50. Hewlett Packard are a very well-known manufacturer of computer peripherals (primarily making their name through inkjet printers, before having a crack at the PC market itself), so I was sure I was getting a decent machine.

The Scanjet has not let me down. It provides decent capability (true colour at up to a resolution of 4800dpi) at a low price, with supreme ease of use. You just plug the power into the wall, connect it to your PC's USB port, install the software, and away you go.

The HP PrecisionScan LT software is very easy to use, you fire it up, put the picture or document you want to scan onto the scanner,
click Go, and it scans the item. It then shows you a preview of what it has picked up, you can alter the resolution, colour definition and size, and either save it or export it (personally I export it to Microsoft Photo Editor so I can play about with it). The scanning area of the scanner is approximately the size of an A4 sheet of paper, which makes it a lot more flexible than the hand scanners of old (which could take documents of infinite length, but the width was restricted to perhaps 4 inches or so).

The only fly in the ointment concerns perhaps the setup of my machine - I run Windows ME, and from time to time the scanner won't scan (although the scanner lights up). Nothing can be done except reset the computer, or in extreme cases reinstall the software until it decides to play ball.

No doubt the 3300c has been superceded by a newer machine providing even better features and resolution, but as a secondhand buy the 3300c will take some beating.

UPDATE: Although I recommended this scanner way back when, that was when I was running Windows ME. If you run Windows XP, this scanner is notoriously difficult to get operating properly. A google search for 'Scanjet 3300C Win XP problem' will bring up a lot of pages...

Summary: Great scanner, low price, but no good if you run Windows XP.

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