HP Photo Scanner 1000 (C9907A)

This is a GREAT little photo scanner. Its so easy to use and put onto your computer. Its also a great price and I ended up buying these for a few friends last christmas. The quality is excellent!!!! The software allows you to instantly see the image and manipulate it before saving it. This is a great gift for someone who has tons of pictures lying around! I cant remember but I think it only goes up to a 5 x 7 print but thats more than enough for me as most of the standard photos I get now are 4 x 6. I do have a digital camera but this is so cheap and comes in handy when my friends show me pictures and i want a copy!

I purchased this scanner at a local store for around the same as Amazon. I plugged it in to my iMac running OS X and iPhoto worked like a champ. This is an incredible bargain scanner. There are some slight annoyances with OS X but not like some of the USB XP issues that I've heard about on various sites. This scanner is NOT DIRECTLY STATED as being compatible with Mac OS X. I've tested this unit in Panther and it also works great. Keep in mind that this scanner is a low-resolution scanner and shouldn't be purchased if you're being picky with detail.

I was nervous that this scanner wouldn't play nicely with my iBook, as I couldn't find any reference on the web to people being able to use it successfully with OS X, but I should have known better than to worry. All I had to do was plug it in to my USB port and I was off and running! It's not the absolute highest scan quality, but for [$] and very little desk space I'm not complaining - it's perfect for web and email stuff. A few notes if you do get one to use with a Mac: 1) The scanner shows up as a removable disk on the desktop and gives the "You forgot to eject me" error when you press the scan button; as far as I can tell, this doesn't hurt anything; 2) if you're going to drag the scanned file to the desktop and then drop it into iPhoto, you'll want to Get Info and unlock the original before trashing it instead of freaking out like I did because it won't go away. Other than those small annoyances (which will probably go away with third-party drivers, if they bother you that much), this little scanner is exactly what I was looking for!

I purchased this product based on the reviews here. However I am very disappointed after using it for only two days.

1) Bad design. My computer can't boot when this scanner is plugged in. I found out from HP's website that this is a known problem for Windows XP. Their solution is "Disconnect the scanner from the hub and restart the computer. Once the computer has started, attach the scanner to the hub" I did not expect this extra step.

2) Poor technical support. The scanner specification indicates that this scanner can scan with maximum resolution of 300x300 dpi and bit depth of 30. So far all the images I scanned have resolution of about 100x100 dpi with 24 bits. I emailed HP technical support twice and asked them how to adjust the resolution. They responded quickly but failed to (or didn't know how to) answer my question. First email from HP said that the software was corrupted and I need to un-install/re-install the software. In the second email they said since that doesn't fix the problem I was given a phone number for "one to one communication with HP technician". By the way this phone number is NOT toll-free. I can't believe they call this
"TECHNICAL SUPPORT"! They just quickly kicked the ball to someone else.

3) It failed to scan very often. After plugging in the scanner, it automatically started to scan with no photo inside and no button pressed. Then it just stop responding even if I pressed the start button this time. I can hear the machine running but the scanning status window does not appear and the software does not start (they suppose to). I used this scanner four times but twice it failed to scan. You can download a software update for Windows XP from HP's website. However this patch is for the newer version of the software (version 3.9). The software that came with my scanner is version 3.1. How to get v3.9? You can get it from HP's website. But you have to pay.

Maybe these problems are associated with Windows XP only since this scanner has several positive reviews here. I may post update in the future.

This is the perfect scanner togo. it doesn't have a power cord so it's portable. you can pretty much scan 4x6 photo to business cards and you can take it anywhere. very easy to use and simple.