[Grrr]

I ask for 3 reasons.. Early last year I think it was, I bought an HP 5300c scanner. Specs looked good enough, price was ok.. So I got one.

1, After about a month.. It stopped working. Naturally, I thought it was a software problem. So I spent ages checking everything, and rechecking, reinstalling, swearing and what not.. Damn thing still refused to work, and it seemed that it developed a fault and would need to be exchanged. But before returning it to the shop, I thought i'd take a quick peek inside it to see if there was anything obviously wrong with it.
And sure enough, the main circuit board was all burned up. Literally! Which does explain the peculier acrid smell I had noticed in the room, just a few days before.

2, The scan quality was fine in colour. But for some reason, black and white scans looked awful.. I know a friend of mine who has a dirt cheap microtek scanner costing much less than my HP. And the quality was far better..

These 2 reasons were reason enough to decide that I didnt want an HP scanner again, so I found a similar priced/speced Epson one. But my luck was out, and so was the shops stock of Epson scanners.. So, I was left with little choice, but to risk getting an identical HP 5300c scanner. And hope that it would last a bit longer than my previous one.
And sure enough, for several months it has been fine, albeit still with naff Black & white scan quality.
So, onto reason 3..

3, OS X drivers! Exactly how long is it supposed to take a large company to come up with OS X drivers? It is beyond a joke now.. I've long sinse dumped OS 9..
Actually, HP DO have OS X drivers, However.. It is for for 10.1.. And even these drivers only came out around the time Apple released OS 10.2, which I had upgraded to almost right away.
So essentially, I still have a driverless scanner.
Ugh..

Anyone else relate??

[zigzag]

Get the VueScan driver from www.hamrick.com (make sure your machine is on the compatible list - it probably is). One of the best $40 I ever spent.

[Grrr]

Not tried it yet, But many thanks in advance

[Timo]

I'm not sure if this is the same for you, but I thought I had a 5300c scanner...but system profiler told me I had a 5400c scanner. Anyway, you might try the driver for the 5400c scanner and see if it works:

http://h20015.www2.hp.com/en/softwar...20X&sw_lang=en

and yes...HP really took their time getting these drivers out. In addition, I've had a chance to compare the line quality, and my neighbor's Epson sure does look better.

[schalliol]

HP Scanners are actually very high quality, historically, especially the [#]c units. The problem has always been the software.

[I Bent My Wookiee]

Sell it and get an Epson scanner.

[macgyvr64]

One of my clients just got a HP PSC 2110 All-in-one (I helped him set it up). It worked flawlessly...scanning, printing, copying...everything. Fully supported in OS X with the included drivers. The software was great. No problems at all. $150 in the Apple Store.

[TMLai]

I think Canon produced the best OS X scanning software at the moment.

VueScan is one of the least usable scanning software I ever use. There are lot of option, but it very hard to get decent scan. The preview function of it is the very worst I've seem.

HP OS X driver is very good but with some major bug need to be iron out. (e.g. the famous processor cycle killer!)

Epson own driver is a very basic piece of tool that just get you started (no full screen preview, very little control), if your buy Epson, make sure you get the professional package that come with Silverfast ai. (Silverfast SE doesn't have color management capability!)

[macgyvr64]

Yeah, I've got a Canon scanner, and VueScan works with it, but it's reeeaaallly slow going. It takes like 5 minutes to scan something around 5''x5'' at 200 dpi. I hooked the same scanner up to my PC and installed Canon's drivers...works fast, works great. I just transfer the scanned files to my Mac over my network :-P