HP Scanjet G4010 review

HP's Scanjet G4010 is a flatbed scanner with a backlight built into the lid. It can make scans of normal reflective documents such as photo prints or a page of text, or use the backlight to capture strips of negatives or positive slides.

While most scanners work by measuring the amount of red, blue and green light that is reflected back from a document or that passes through film, the G4010 records six channels of colour. This gives it a 96-bit colour depth rather than the usual 48-bit. HP says that capturing red, orange, yellow, green, cyan and blue information allows the scanner to capture a richer, truer image. Printing photos with six colours generally produces better results than using three or four, so we were interested to see if HP's technology produced better scans.

This scanner feels sturdy and well made. There's a useful handle moulded into the lid, which also has four large short-cut buttons. You can load film strips directly into a mount built into the document mat, but the alignment is marked by a head and shoulders icon that doesn't make it clear which way up they should go. The box contains a USB cable and a generous software bundle that includes image-editing and optical character recognition (OCR) applications. There's no scan head lock, so you need only install the software before you can begin scanning. You can choose between an energy-saving mode, where the scan lamp is extinguished shortly after a scan, or a fast warm-up mode, where it's kept lit for longer.

Unfortunately, the G4010 uses HP's TWAIN interface software, which is clunky and frustrating to use. It doesn't allow you to make multiple scans in one session and won't automatically remember your preview image or settings between sessions. This is frustrating when you're scanning film, as you have to wait for nearly a minute for the scanner to warm up and complete a reflective preview before you can switch it into transparency mode. We found ourselves wishing we'd selected the fast warm-up mode during the install.

We weren't impressed with the scan quality. Documents on white paper weren't crisply focused, and had a blue tint in regions where the document mat hadn't held the paper flush with the scanner's glass. The G4010 didn't produce sharp film scans and wasn't able to distinguish subtly different dark shades in slide film.

The G4010 has a high-quality feel and comes with some useful software, but HP's scan interface is a pain to use. The G4010 is little cheaper than Epson's Perfection 4490 Photo, which is much better for scanning film.