HP ScanJet 5590 Digital FlatBed Scanner

I can't believe HP made this pathetic product. Every 5th paper jams with the automatic document feeder. I should have done my homework on Google, which has plenty of nightmare stories about this product. I returned this product and bought a printer/scanner combo with an auto document feeder. It works great and cost about 60% less. Ironically, it is also an HP product.

This is really not a horrible product. HP claims on its site that this scanner is compatible with Mac OSX 10.6 Not until after I got the scanner and tried to download the software that I discovered HP did not plan to release 10.6 software til the coming spring. Besides that i'm sure it works great with other computers...The duplex is really truly slow... unlike other duplex scanners that scan both sides of the page at the same time, this scanner scans one side, then flips the page around, scans the other side, flips it around AGAIN to spit it back out the other end....quality was decent, scans were typically straight, and clear...file sizes were larger than normal, but that was HP's software... Instead I decided to use my brother All in one laser copy fax to scan everything in using the Automatic Document Feeder....It was only $99 compared to HP's $259, its faster, and produces smaller PDF sizes....PLUS...works PERFECTLY with Mac OSX 10.6-

Nice piece of hardware for the price, but no tech support whatsoever to correct problems:

1. Five buttons on front have no labels. Either that or the back lighting doesn't work.
2. Scan software insists on appending sequence numbers to file names with no way to shut off.
3. Typical software for a hardware company: geeky and hard to figure out.

This replaced an older scanner. Works great and easy to install. The two sided feature is an added bonus from older model.

First the Good - price is good if everything works for specs. Unfortunately it won't because of serious design flaws.

Bad - almost everything
1. ADF is useless - Why
You cannot clean inner most rollers.
So after some use duplex scanning is dead, cleaning cloth won't help for inner rollers.

ADF scanning window uses flimsy plastic between paper and light which obviously will have markings with some use as paper passing through is pressed against it. So unless you replace it after some use, you will have continuous running scratch marks across the scan via ADF.

ADF uses single roller to pull the paper from tray. This is a nightmare design for duplex scanning, even slightly misplaced paper will get jammed when its reversed in tray below for duplex scanning - Result paper jammed, you cannot open ADF and release jamming rollers. To recover paper, all you can do is open ADF cover and pull the paper, if you are lucky you will get it back in one piece or in few pieces and there goes your important document shredded. Why can't HP put extra roller at top of ADF mechanism and pull papers properly to begin with or allow way to release rollers so paper can be safely retrieved is beyond any design logic.

2. Software provided is useless unless you stick to predefined settings in software, there is no way to change simple settings like brightness or drop a background color. If you do b&w scanning from flatbed it removes background color whether you want it or not, no choice there, for example news paper. Same thing via adf does not remove background color when news paper is scanned as b&w. Again no choice this is predefined behavior of software.

To summarize you can use it as a flatbed scanner with predefined settings in HP software if that works for you.

But for just flatbed there is no reason to select this model and pay this price, correct?