HP ScanJet 5590 Digital FlatBed Scanner Save 39% off

• Up to 2,400 dpi optical resolution
• 48-bit color depth, 256 levels of grayscale
• 5-button front panel for everyday tasks
• Transparent material adapter
• Hi-Speed USB interface, PC and Mac compatible

I have been looking for a reasonably priced duplex ADF scanner for some time now, I want to scan a file cabinet of documents and shred the originals. I thought this HP was it, it isn''t. I spent several hours over a few days giving this guy a workout. I scanned stacks of bank statements (30-35 pages at a time) (8.5 x 11) and mortgage documents (8.5 x 14) both single sided and double sided. Several times the ADF jammed (roller slipped and eventually gave up) and I had to man handle the stuck page out, I could find no way to release its grasp of the paper. These were not glossy pages, just typical bank statements. Other times one or two pages of a stack of 35 would scan in only a third of the page. It cannot scan duplex pages longer then 12 inches, I don''t know why. Duplex scanning takes more then twice as long as simplex because it has only a single scanner and must flip the page (I think it does this flipping twice). The software wasn''t smart enough to handle scanning mix length pages, if I had a document (for example: mortgage papers) with a mix of letter and legal size pages I had to tell the software that all the pages were 14 inches long otherwise it truncated the legal size to 11 inches. It all boils down to a lack of trust for me. Before I go shredding originals of these documents I need to be able to trust that I have good electronic copies and this scanner/software didn''t establish that trust.

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Sorry for the juvenile review title, but there''s really no other way to put into words the frustration that I have experienced from trying to work with this stupid thing.

The interface is cumbersome and largely unnecessary. I bought it because, at the time, it was just about the only reasonably-priced multi document feeding scanner I could find. I don''t need this multi document feed for office work, like most people; I need it for animation. If you''re at all familiar with the process of animation, it requires that MANY MANY MANY pictures be used, and I was looking forward to cutting down on my work time by having the scanner do most of my paper loading for me. Oh, foolish little me!

Not only does the paper jam 60% of the time, but the scanner always wants to scan it into the stupid software that came bundled with the scanner. So even if I''m trying to scan an image directly into Adobe Photoshop, I first have to go through the "HP Gallery" or whatever, copy the picture, and bring it in that way. I set it so that it automatically scans into Photoshop, but when I turn off my computer, it forgets its new instructions and goes back to uploading everything in the HP Gallery. It eats up time, desktop space, and PATIENCE.

Oh yes, and the TWAIN drivers that it supposedly comes with won''t work on my Macintosh. Sure, it specifies that NOW, but back then when I was doing tireless research on the product, it didn''t tell me that you can only get the drivers on a PC, so I basically wasted $500.00 on a piece of machinery that isn''t compatible with my platform, my animation program, nor my sanity.

HP wasn''t much help; they advised me to download some free software from their site that would install the TWAIN drivers that I''d need to work with my animation program, even though the software was originally for a digital camera and not a scanner. "It should still work, even though it''s not technically for that hardware," says the guy. Well, no, quite frankly. It does not, in fact, work. All that it does now is confuse my scanner for a digital camera and refuse to upload anything into Photoshop or any other program for some bizarre reason. In uploading the digital camera software, by the way, it completely wiped the existence of the scanning software that I already had on my computer so that I had to manually upload it again.

I can''t wait to sell this thing and get at least a portion of my money back. This thing is such a headache, please don''t waste your time with it.

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Had to chime in on this one. We got the scanner about four months ago to replace a discount-bin flatbed Canon. It''s true that the thing occasionally locks up on me and requires a cord-pull. (Anybody else miss ''off'' switches?) The ADF also spazzes on some pages no rhyme or reason to it, just about 00.5% of the docs I scan it can''t grip or something.

The good news is that for what I do (making PDFs from official letters for business records)it works great. The front panel buttons can be set up to output to a PDF without any additional input or software interference I just tap in how many pages, press the ''scan document'' button I''ve got tweaked, and it doesn''t bother me until it needs a save name for the PDF.

I do a mix of Letter and Legal, which could be a headache the scanner can''t do duplex Legal, or Letter and Legal in the same job. However, the workaround is easy. After each scan job it asks if I need to scan more pages into the document. I scan the first set, then click more and scan the next. The ADF recognises which type it''s dealing with, so there''s no reconfiguring going between stacks of Letter and stacks of Legal.

Would I recommend this scanner? Not for everybody. It''s not optimised ''out-of-the-box'', and it''s twitchy enough that you kind of have to know your way around to keep it running. I''m a pretty competent tech, and I like it just fine, but I don''t know if Grandma is going to put up with its'' shenanigans. This would be less of an issue if the HP tech support were helpful, but I haven''t been able to get a straight answer out of them regarding my issues, and I speak the lingo.

This is a great scanner, but it is not User Friendly.

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REVISED 11/12. We have retired this scanner. Physically, it still works but the HP software (Windows Vista) is a nightmare. The interface frequently hangs; there have been firewall issues; we have found it necessary to uninstall and reinstall the entire software package more than once. If you absolutely need an automatic or double sided scanner, then this may be one of the few ways to go. If a one page at a time scanner is satisfactory, then there are clearly better alternatives.

Rating should probably be revised down to 2* because of the poor software.

Not recommended.

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Windows XP. SP2. Single Gateway Profile computer. MS Office. Adobe Acrobat 7 Professional. USB Connected.

Mostly used for scanning documents directly into *.PDF files WITHOUT using the OCR feature.

We bought this scanner a few months ago to replace a 7 year old HP Scanner, also with a document feeder.

The HP Scanjet 5590 is not something you can expect to work right out of the box; it isn''t as plug-and-play as we would have liked.

The included software is extensive and takes a long time to load (and to repair!). It may also require some tweaks to work at all, one of which we got from HP on the telephone and another (to improve scans into PDF) we found on their web site.

Once working, the software is still not "intuitive". There are many complexities to scanning and the HP software has a significant learning curve.

The scanner warms up quickly; the document feeder is fast and reasonably reliable but can jam if it doesn''t like the paper fed through it.

The double sided scan works but again, the paper must be be good quality.

We have had no difficulty scanning a dozen or more pages either through the document feeder or indivual scan into a single PDF file. We have also scanned single photos into *.jpg with good results. We have not scanned slides or negatives.

We only use the software controls and can''t comment on the button features.

We have not yet had to partially disassemble and manually clean the document feeder and have no comment on this feature either.

In summery: If you have some computer experience, especially with scanning and you have time to sort out the glitches, you can probably make the 5590 work for you and get good results. If you are a relative novice, this may not be the right place to start.

Add: 09/08. We purchased a new computer running on VISTA (former had XP) and attached the scanner. A software download was required. The unit installed easily and worked faster and with fewer glitches than previously.

UPDATE early 2010. We began to have software issues when the computer kept saying that certain files were unavavilable.

The solution (per HP) is to download the proper software, move it to a SEPARTATE FOLDER, click to open and EXPAND the files and then do the installation.

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I use this scanner at work, even though I''ve tried to convince them not to order these. This scanner and the HP 550 below it are horrible. The software that comes with it takes up a ton of memory usage and is just generally bad. The OCR reader software and scanner are really poor and it is almost easier to just re-type documents yourself. Another issues is that the scanner is constantly being removed from the scanner list in Windows. We use about 6 of these scanners at work, and as the IT guy, I constantly have people calling me and telling me that Windows says they have no scanner installed. I have to "reinstall" them by removing the USb cable and plugging it back in so Windows will recognize it. Additionally, the document feeder james and sucks up multiple pages constantly.

The biggest problem however is that this scanner DOES NOT WORK with Adobe Acrobat. The software is incompatible. You can scan 15 pages of a document, but the software will only return the first page to Acrobat. You cannot do multiple page scans with Acrobat unless you do each page separately. If you visit the HP help forum you''ll see this is a common problem with several of their scanners, and has been for over two years yet it still hasn''t been fixed. The only way around this problem is to install a third party driver.

I would stay away from this unless you can find it really cheaply.