The Scanjet 4670 delivers top-notch scanning performance in a unit that's surprisingly thin. Read our Australian review.It's been a good long while since anyone at ZDNet Australia's been able to say that they were actually excited by a scanner. To give you an idea of how long, think back to a time when a stock options in lieu of salary seemed like a good idea and Windows 98 seemed like exciting new software that just might deliver what Microsoft promised it would. Part of the problem for scanners is that the market has been somewhat oversaturated with carbon-copy clones with low resolution. There's also been the strong impact of MFDs with integrated scanners, further diluting the number of people who genuinely need an actual standalone scanner.
The HP Scanjet 4670, however, did excite us, at least in terms of its physical implementation. Rather than using the standard flat bed and lid of a traditional scanner, the 4670 comes as three components; the scanning bed itself, which is extremely thin and flat, a vertical holder for the scanning bed to sit in, photo-frame style, and a transparency scanning unit that can clip onto the front of the scanning bed. The main scanning bed isn't just thin; at only 19mm it's practically not even there. The rest of the scanner's dimensions (413mm wide x 298mm deep) are more on the regular side. It's on the light side at 1.4kg, but that's for the best given its semi-portable nature.
The thin style of the Scanjet 4670 is quite appealing, but it does introduce some practical hitches. Far too often for our liking when we removed it from the holding frame, we'd hit the scanning buttons that are located on the side of the scanning bed, exactly where most people would try to hold it. As a portable unit, it's also more prone than normal to fingerprint smudging that can significantly affect the output quality of scans.
Installation is handled via HP's now rather standard multilingual poster. Whether or not you've got it turned onto the right side for your particular lingual fluency is largely irrelevant, as the picture guide is quite good. Setup is a little unusual, in that you've got to untape all of the cables and connectors from the scanning bed; these are packed in foam to stop them scratching the always-exposed scanner plate glass. A single cable snakes out of the scanner bed, ending in a combined USB 2.0 port and power adaptor. This isn't an entirely ideal solution; depending on where your USB plug sits you can end up (as we did in some configurations) with yet another ugly power cable to hide and/or move off the keyboard. Once you've sorted out the cables, installation is as simple as running the supplied CD and hooking up the Scanjet 4670 to either a Mac (OS 9.1 or greater) or PC (Windows 98 or greater).
While the supplied stand allows you to easily place documents and objects for scanning, there's nothing stopping you moving the Scanjet 4670 around to scan in objects of your choice, although it's quite vital to remember which side the optical head actually reads to; place the scanner the wrong way around and you'll get a lovely black scan of the sky above your chosen scanning project. This makes the Scanjet 4670 remarkably flexible, although at the expense of regular scanning modes; it's still easier to put a single flat document into a regular scanning bed than on the 4670.
A scanner in this price range will only sell to two markets; those who like the look of the unit, and those needed professional quality scans. With that in mind the Scanjet 4670 comes supplied with a transparency scanner that plugs into the side of the scanning unit via one of the longest plugs we've ever seen on any PC equipment. Bend this, and it's game over.
In software terms the 4670 comes with HP's usual scanning software and director application, as well as ReadIris Pro 9, Adobe Acrobat Reader and Arcsoft Panorama Maker. You can opt to install all of these at the same time, but annoyingly this only launches each install in turn, forcing you to click through a number of tedious and repetitive licensing agreements.
At 2400x2400dpi resolution and 48 bit colour depth, the Scanjet 4670 is certainly technically capable of decent quality scans, and with USB 2.0 connectivity it's not likely to be limited by data transfer speeds, although you still have to wait for the scanning head to move the length of the plate. The initial scan when first using the unit involves waiting for the lamp to warm up (~20 seconds in our testing) but once ready it's capable of a prescan at 200dpi in around 4 seconds. Bringing that up to 600 dpi made little difference, as did the scan time at a whopping and painful 9600dpi. Scanning at 200dpi a full page magazine cover scan took an average of 15 seconds, which is acceptably fast for a low resolution scan. Tripling the DPI more than tripled the time, with a 600dpi scan taking an average of 1:10 after the initial prescan. Our only complaint with the 4670 in the scanning department is that the thinner body of the unit makes it less absorbent of the high-pitched scanning sound, which is a touch more prevalent than in fuller-bodied models.
HP Scanjet 4670
Company: HP Australia
Price: AU$499
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 13 23 47
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