I purchased this product, without having read any reviews, or even seen it action, which was a mistake I know but the price was so keen, it had to be done!

At this price bracket I could have got a very good 'normal' scanner, but that didnlt suit my needs. Having been a keen photographer in the past, I had a large collection of slides that I wanted to be able to scan in. The Scanjet 4470 was the best priced unit I could find to perform this function.

The unit itself, as most HP stuff is these days, is good looking and simple to use. It was east to set up, with clear and easy to follow instructions. The supplied software was also good, including a proper (not shareware) copy of the must have image viewer, ACDSee.

Getting the unit scanning was also easy, with the included HP program performing it job very well, and doing an admirable job of recognising the media to be scanned (Black & White, Greyscale, Colour etc). The unit does a prescan which allows you to select your scan area more precisely, and then does the actual scan which you can save, or open with a program (one of the supplied packages of one of your choice).

Initial photo scans were impressive, all the detail seemed to be there, even in the important shadow and light areas. So far, I was well happy. Then came to scanning some colour negatives. The light unit for this is, again, an easy to use piece of kit which simply plugs in the back of the scanner and affixes to the top of the scan unit glass. Although the scans from negatives weren't bad, they were not quite as good as I had expected, with the resulting images being a bit on the dark side. Of course all this sort of stuff can be fixed in a decent image editor program. At least the detail was all there.

It is still early days in my usage of this scanner, and it would be fair to say that although it didn't blow my socks off, it remains a sensible, solid purchase if you need the slide attachment
, at this price.