Hewlett Packard ScanJet 3300C review

After a printer, we reckon a scanner is the most useful peripheral you can add to your PC.

HP's ScanJet 3300C looks fairly standard as A4 colour flatbeds go. Its most distinguishing feature is a couple of buttons on the front of the unit.

One of these buttons initiates the scanning procedure - a fairly common feature - but this one's slicker than most. It automatically starts up the unit's standalone scanning program, makes a preview scan, decides if it was a picture or text and spits out the final image into the appropriate application - all pretty much automatically. The second button takes this simplicity of use even further. If you have both a printer and scanner you can use them in concert as a photocopier, if a fairly slow one. This button launches straight into the application designed to do this.

Even if, like most people, you're not planning to use your scanner for especially serious work, you should still demand the best image quality you can get. Producing enlargements, for example, is an exceedingly taxing task that depends crucially on the focus of the scanner. OCR (which turns text scans into text files) is less fussy - but again, the closer the scan is to the original document, the better the recognition results will be.

The HP's optical resolution, at 600x1200, is respectably high, but in reality images were poorer than the competition. While it picked out quite a bit of detail, scans showed lots of interference in the form of speckled bands of red, green and blue, giving an unpleasant appearance close-up. Similarly, colours were great from a distance, but zoom in and that speckling was hard to ignore. At least our OCR tests showed no sighs of problems.

For one-touch simplicity, HP's aim to turn its ScanJet models into 'scanning appliances' has been pretty successful. The two front panel buttons plus the highly-automated, integrated software certainly make it easy to use, although we have reservations about its quality.