Cheap Hewlett Packard C7193A ScanJet 5200Cxi Color Scanner (Electronics) (Windows NT, Windows 2000 Server, Windows XP, Windows Me, Windows NT 5, Windows NT 4) Price

To set up the ScanJet, we connected the USB cable to our PC, plugged in the AC power, and turned on the PC. We bypassed the Windows '98 new hardware wizard, dropped in the HP ScanJet Software CD-ROM, and followed the ScanJet setup wizard. The entire process was straightforward and intuitive.

After restarting Windows '98, we installed and ran Adobe PhotoDeluxe Business Edition (included among the ScanJet software), and followed its built-in wizards to scan a color photograph. The result was a beautifully sharp image that was very true to the original.

We also installed a trial edition of OmniPage Pro 8.0, the renowned optical character recognition (OCR) software from Caere, along with PageKeeper Standard. (You must install PageKeeper in order for OmniPage to work with the scanner, a detail that was not at all intuitively apparent but that we found by trial and error.) We scanned a heavily marked, wrinkled text document containing several fonts and viewed the results in OmniPage. (Because OmniPage also works with Microsoft Word, we repeated the process from within Word by selecting Acquire Text from Word's File menu.) Although the process of scanning, interpreting, checking, and exporting text was slow, both the scanner and the OmniPage software performed well. Our pencil marks did confuse the OCR software, but the unblemished text was correctly interpreted and the quality of the scan was excellent. Wrinkled and slightly torn pages did not interfere with the scanning, only actual marks through letters prevented a correct interpretation.

With Hewlett Packard's reputation for quality and its long-standing investment in scanning products for both home and business use, we're not at all surprised by the good results we got from the ScanJet 5200Cxi.

Pros:

• Nice software bundle
• USB and parallel connectivity

Cons

• Relatively large and heavy