HP Scanjet N6310 Review December 24, 2008 11:05 by John Sollars
It is a long time since I owned a standalone scanner and still have somewhere a Scanjet 3c when Colour scanning was still a novelty!. So when we recently took delivery of a brand new HP Scanjet N6310 I was looking forward to comparing them.
Our first impressions of the machine were OK, light and dark grey colour scheme and taking up about the size of two A4 pages on my desk. Interestingly the machine came with all the cables needed including a USB one (which I was half not expecting) so it plugged in and worked straight out of the box. Software installation was also remarkably easy with both Windows and Mac discs being supplied. We were scanning documents within five minutes of unpacking it.
The scanning was very impressive, we ran a 16 page two sided document through it and saved it as a searchable PDF, the document was dense text with many graphics and the OCR worked superbly as did the Duplex scanning - which we hadn't expected to be as easy as it was. I was truly impressed with the quality of the finished document and the fact that when we searched it all of the logos and images (where possible) had the text converted and were searchable.
It took about 5 minutes to scan 16 pages of an A4 double sided document, but then about 10 minutes to render it as a searchable PDF - understandable I suppose considering the processor work that was going on. We watched the Task Manager and were impressed by the Multi-Threading
The N6310 comes with Automatic Document Feed (ADF) which we used extensively, and worked well for us. It also comes with a Transparent Materials adapter (TMA) for scanning slide negatives which we didn't have any need to use, but with a 48 bit resolution and 2400 x 2400 dpi optical resolution it should give excellent results.
Priced at about £400 and available online quite easily the reason to buy a standalone scanner in these days of Multi Function Printers is a difficult decision to make. Comparing this machine specification to the HP Officejet Pro L7590 would make for a very difficult buying decision in fact it wouldn't as the Officejet wins hand down, giving printer, scanner, copier and fax all with Network capabilities built in means that for my money the Officejet is the better buy at only around £179 online.
The only reason I was looking for a scanner was to enable us to be able to add invoices that are still sent through the post into our accounts software as a PDF. About 50% of our suppliers send their invoices as an email attachment and we have been adding those to their accounts as they have been received, so the opportunity of quickly and efficiently adding all of our supplier invoices to the system was enough of a benefit to push me to consider adding the machine to our infrastructure.
The machine does what it says on the box and does it very efficiently, but I think that the days of standalone scanners is over. I used to work for a large Distribution company back in the mid 90's and they had some very expensive scanners which a large department scanned all documents onto the mainframe. If you had lots of double sided documents to scan on a regular basis then the N6310 would do a great job for you, if however you have a small business that needs occasional scanning go for a Multi Function Printer
