Review of the HP Scanjet 4890

HP Scanjet 4890 Price £165 www.hp.co.uk Scanner type: Conventional moving lens and sensor Maximum scan resolution: 4800x9600ppi Film handling: Up to sixteen 35 mm slides or 30 negative frames; two 120 mm or one 5 x 4" transparency Hardware dust and scratch removal: No Connectity: USB 2.0 High-Speed Other features: Hp Image Zone software suite The HP Scanjet 4890 comes in an initially impressive desktop-eating form factor. But favourable first-impressions didn't last long. The 4890 was the noisy and on default settings scan results were over-saturated and too light, requiring a fair bit of post-processing to get decent results. As usual, HP's unconventional scanner control software is easy for newbies to use but gets frustratingly fiddly to use when you want more custom control. Perhaps the 4890's best asset is its generous film scan capacity of up to 16 mounted slides or 30 film strip frames per batch. But as so much work is needed to knock the scans in to shape, this positive feature is rather blunted.