( 70 reviews )
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Posted: Aug 10 2009
I bought this scanner to scan medium and large format negatives at high resolution. First off the software is junk and has no real B&W support. So I bought a different piece of software which makes the scanner even more expensive. It worked acceptably for a couple of weeks then started scanning jibberish. After several painful hours with tech support (which is only open during the day, weekdays, for scanners) I finally demanded a replacement unit. They only replaced the bottom half and although that seemed to fix the problem, a couple weeks later it started doing the same thing. Now to just make sure it was the scanner, the scanning software is installed on two different Vista machines and one XP Pro machine, same problem on all three. Check out the reviews on HP's website for this scanner, then if you still buy one like me, you will get what you deserve.
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Posted: Aug 9 2009
If you are looking for an HP product that will get you average results then this scanner will fit the bill. If you are looking for quality results to archive your photos, this is not the scanner for you. I scanned a set of 35mm negatives and had a "big-box-store" digitize the same negatives. Those scanned by the G4050 are darker and have faded colors in a side-by-side comparison. The G4050 35mm negative scans are notably redder as well and not near as crisp. When scanning photographs, the G4050 picks up a lot of details. However, black fields have a very notable grey tint and there are a lot of white spots. The scanner is picking up so much detail that it picks-up the reflections of the imperfections and variations of the surface of the paper and renders these as white dots. Selecting to remove this noise fails to darken the black fields, fails to remove the noise, and adds a lot of time to the scanning process. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the G4050 is its speed. At a resolution of 200dpi, it takes 10 seconds to load the scanning software from the time you press the scanner-lid button and another 80 seconds to do the pre-scan to review the image you want to scan. After making any changes and selecting "accept", it takes an additional 2 minutes to perform the scan (3.5 min total). The same scan at a resolution of 600 dpi takes 70 seconds for the pre-scan and the scan itself took 7 min 50 seconds (9 min 10 seconds). Then the editing begins. If you have owned other HP scanners (like I have) or have owned an HP all in one device, be prepared for issues when installing the driver for the G4050. According to HP tech support (with whom I spent 7+ hours on the phone over a 4 day period) "sometimes" the driver for the device you are replacing will need to be totally uninstalled (using up to 4 additional script programs provided on the installation CD in addition to the uninstall programs in Add/Remove programs) and you may still need to delete entries from the registry: manually. I also had issues with the bundled HP Photosmart Essentials program recognizing my HP A637 Photo Printer. The solution to this issue was to delete the A637 driver and reinstall it. In my opinion, the applications bundled with the G4050 lack quality when compared with the applications that were bundled with legacy HP equipment. I expected better results from this scanner.
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Posted: Aug 5 2009
WORKS GREAT. I HAVE NO COMPLAINTS. DOES EVERYTHING I WONTED IT TO. COULD NOT BE HAPPIER. SCANS SLIDES, NEGITIVES AND PRINTS.
