Tips for the HP6350C (HP Scanjet 6350C)

Member Name: Jove

Product:	HP Scanjet 6350C
Date:	23/05/01 (568 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good quality scans, Seems reliable, Useful software (but needs tweaking)

Disadvantages: Noisy, Slide adaptor is useless

I've been using a Hewlett Packard 6350C scanner at home for about a year, and it's predecessor the 6250C at work for a while longer and I have a few comments which might help others.......

The scanning software seems to work well apart from an occasional annoying tendancy for the preview image to come up in grey when you want to scan in colour, requiring you to reselect 16m colours. Colleagues with similar HP scanners don't have this problem so maybe it's something odd with my computer's configuration

Some of the other software is useful, but not directly. The scanner comes with a pretty useless Adobe cut-down bitmap manipulation package with an added extra - a PDF printer driver allowing you to print from just about any windows software to Acrobat pdf files. Unfortunately uninstalling the bitmap manipulator also uninstalls the pdf driver.

To get round this and keep the driver without the dross, open the printers list from your start-settings menu. Select the PDF "printer" and print a test pdf page. Open this in the PDF viewer (I guess everybody has this) and make a note of the driver files listed on the page. Then copy these files to somewhere safe, unistall the software and then move the copies back to their original locations.

One other useful file to copy and keep is the PLUGIN.DLL file which the Adobe software installs in the Windows\System folder. If you copy this file, uninstall the software and then replace the file, you will be able to use Adobe Photoshop format plugins with other packages such as Paint Shop Pro. A lot of these plugins are available as freeware on the web.

I bought my PC and scanner as a complete system, but when I first received the scanner there was a scratch on the glass. The unit was replaced by the dealer without a fuss. It turned out that when they set up the system they'd tested it by scanning a page from a magazine and accidentally scratched the glass wit
h the staple. If you want to scan from magazines it would be a good idea to remove the staples first.

The scanner manual advises against using alcohol or tape head cleaning fluid to clean the glass. A colleague with a similar scanner ignored this and the glass went very slightly cloudy in places. It didn't seem to affect the scan quality though.

The slide adaptor is pretty useless. The idea is that you place a 35mm transparency in the device and place it on the cover glass. When you scan the light bounces off mirrors within the device and down through the slide onto the scanner's detector array. Sounds OK in theory but I spent ages fiddling with the scanning settings but never managed to get very good results. If you want to scan loads of negatives or transparencies then a dedicated film scanner would be a better bet (they start at around £300). In the end I sold my slide adaptor at a car boot sale.

Overall the scanner is pretty good and produces excellent results. The document feeder is a bit noisy but then it's not something that most people would use very often.

Summary: