User:Woozle/HP 4370

Computing: Hardware: HP ScanJet 4370: Woozle review

I purchased the unit on 2006-02-14 to replace Harena's old AcerScan 620UT, which is still working as I write but which had developed some annoying streaks in the scanned image which made it unsuitable for scanning photographs.

Delivery

I ordered from Newegg, which seemed to have the best price by about $5 (I had considered getting it from a local Office Depot, OfficeMax, or Best Buy, but where the model was available in general it was never in stock in my local store); they delivered it in 2 days (which is apparently an internal goal of NewEgg's, though not a guarantee). The box seemed somewhat battered on the outside (photo available; will upload when I have time) and rattled a bit, but there was no evidence of damage to the scanner. It was in fact the scanner doing most of the rattling, which leads me to wonder if something was supposed to be clamped down – but the instructions show no evidence of any shipping restraints to remove.

Hookup

There was an awkward pause when I noticed that the scanner's power adapter is a three-prong wall wart, which meant that I didn't have any free sockets into which it could be inserted. One plug-bar later (my count is now four plug bars), I had it powered up and hooked to a USB cable.

Software

While I could use this scanner with Windows if I had to, I would much rather get it working with Linux. The good news is that Linux did detect it, and sane-find-scanner returned the following:

found USB scanner (vendor=0x03f0 [hewlett packard], product=0x4105 [hp scanjet]) at libusb:001:003
  # Your USB scanner was (probably) detected. It may or may not be supported by
  # SANE. Try scanimage -L and read the backend's manpage.

The bad news is that scanimage -L returned this:

No scanners were identified. If you were expecting something different,
check that the scanner is plugged in, turned on and detected by the
sane-find-scanner tool (if appropriate). Please read the documentation
which came with this software (README, FAQ, manpages).

The SANE web site confirms that the 4370 is not yet supported. However, it looks like there is a 3rd-party driver in development which apparently works (and which will eventually be included with SANE when it is ready), so I have downloaded that and will try it next.