HP ScanJet 5590 Digital FlatBed Scanner

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?

Works very well, gives options for whatever you are scanning, uses several different formats. Scans are true to originals.

After using the 5590 for a week, the question I keep asking myself : "Is this really an HP product?!?" I am truly disappointed that a company I respect as much as HP would design such an awful product.

The major flaws I have found with this product:
1. Auto Document Feeder jams up quite frequently and there is no way to remove the document short of brute force! We've all dealt with paper jams and we know that somewhere on the device, there is a latch that you pull that makes the paper easy to remove. No such thing for this scanner. Be prepared to tear a few original docs as you pull hard

2. Duplex printing is so slow, it's like watching paint dry. I have a Fujitsu Scansnap and the HP 5590 both connected to my computer. No exaggeration, the Scansnap can copy 5 pages in duplex mode for every page the HP scans!

3. OCR software (ReadIris) feels old and clunky. ReadIris does a good job converting images to text, but the user interface is really bad. Deleting a scanned page or changing the order of pages requires far to many mouse clicks. The software won't auto load my preferences, I've got to do that manually, and there are too many "Are you sure you want to do this?" messages you've got to click "yes" on to get a simple doc scanned. Maybe this doesn't sound like a big deal, but trust me, if you even scan a dozen individual docs, this becomes a major pain in the you-know-what.


I love HP and eventhough they are not the cheapest, I know I can buy their products without fear of regretting my purchase. Sadly, the HP 5590 has changed that. There are far better products on the market, don't waste your time and money on this one.

Not only did the underside of the scanner glass develop a serious haze, but it's not possible to get the scanner fixed. I've been on the phone with HP several times and can't even find a service center. Piece o' junk, will be going to recycling soon.

I have just installed this scanner so I cannot comment on its long term effectiveness but the installation process was hellacious, probably the most difficult peripheral I have had to install in a considerable length of time.

There is an inordinate amount of voodoo science with the product. It doesn't work with a surge protector, only if plugged directly into an outlet (I don't know if a simple power strip works); I have never encountered such a restriction before. There is a very precise sequence required in connecting the scanner to the computer, and in powering down if a restart is required. Finally the software as shipped (I'm using Mac OS X) simply doesn't work. One has to download software from the HP site. It's one thing to have to upgrade a provided version, its something else when the provided software just doesn't work. I'm hoping the rest of the experience with the scanner is better than that initially.