There is a new scanner in our house—thanks to my mother-in-law. Why might she be interested in my having a third scanner? Well, she just happens to have a lot of old, very large negatives floating around her house, and the HP 5370C series flatbed scanners come with a transparency adapter good for scanning in transparencies, photographic negatives or photographic slides up to 5" x 5" in size.

I have had an HP IIcx flatbed scanner for many years. And it has really been a workhorse for me. I think I have had it for at least seven years. It has been extremely reliable and does fast scans of standard pages of up to 14" in length. It does a good job on photographs, and, coupled with TextBridge Pro’s OCR software, I have converted a lot of printed text to digital text. It has a 400 dpi optical resolution and does its scans quite fast with no warm up of the light.

But the IIcx cannot scan negatives. That is why my son added an HP PhotoSmart photo scanner to my collection several years back. It will scan 35 mm negatives and slides at an optical resolution of 2400 ppi (pixels per inch), and the results are quite good. It also scans regular photographs up to 5" x 7" at an optical resolution of 300 ppi. I think here we can equate ppi with dpi. So it would be better to scan a photograph using the IIcx; however, if you have a negative for the photo available, the results of using the negative scanner instead of scanning the photo itself in either scanner is superior. So I always scan a negative instead of a photo when I can.

Unfortunately the HP PhotoSmart scanner will not scan negatives larger than 35 mm, and I have a lot of 6 cm x 7 cm and larger negatives. That is where the new scanner comes in. Using the transparency adapter displayed in the photo above, I can scan these negatives at 1200 dpi (I don’t know why HP keeps going back and forth between dpi and ppi in their specifications). It would be nice to be able to scan them at 2400 dpi, but since they are so large, the 1200 dpi scan of one of them contains more information than would a 2400 dpi scan of a 35 mm negative of the same subject.

But what about a comparison of using the PhotoSmart photographic scanner versus the 5370C with transparency adapter for either 35 mm slides or negatives? I did the comparison, and the PhotoSmart scanner is superior. I assume for the simple reason that scanning at 2400 dpi will give sharper results than will scanning at 1200 dpi. The color balance also seemed better with the HP PhotoSmart scanner.

But for an all in one scanner, I think the HP 5370 Cse is a real good buy. You get 1200 dpi flatbed scanning for documents and photos with the addition of respectable—although not top notch—scanning of slides and negatives. I think, however, that the average individual will be quite content with the quality of the negative and slide scans that it produces.

The HP 5370 also provides for one button scanning by allowing you to scan by simply pressing one of four buttons on the front of the scanner. There is a button to scan directly to your email program, your printer, your fax program or to your scanning software. A warning, though: If you are installing the scanner on a Windows Me computer, you will need to go to the HP site and download a small patch to make the buttons work.

Personally, I prefer to scan from the HP ScanJet software. And if you are going to use the transparency adapter you will have to use the software. Additional features include the ability to scan a document to text, which means that the HP software contains an optical character recognition (OCR) module. If the document is of good quality, like a page printed by a laser printer, then I found the text was recognized fairly well but not as well as by my standalone OCR program TextBridge Pro. However, for a small amount of OCR work on good quality documents, the included option should be sufficient. I acquired the article from the 1989 Bits of Blue reproduced in this issue using Text capture of the 5370 scanner.

The scanner costs $300 at the local CompUSA store, and for an additional $200 list you can get an automatic document feeder. The scanner can be connected to the computer with either a parallel printer port connection or by a USB connection. I like the USB connection. Additionally with the USB connection it should be easy to move the scanner between different computers.

In addition to the HP PrecisionScan Pro software, you also get

• Corel Print Office 2000
• Boomerang Internet Design Shop Gold
• eFax Messenger Plus
• Caere PageKeeper Standard
• Hemera Graphics Desk for HP