When working with the scanner I noticed that sometimes it would not wake up from its sleep, and the control program would give out the following error message:
The problem vanishes on a second try: HP’s programmers just didn’t account for the maximum time-out when the scanner starts up with a cold lamp. The program doesn’t get a scanner’s response in time and reacts to it by issuing the error message.
Returning to the buttons, they are programmable. You can assign them different actions though the Buttons Settings utility:
As you see, the window is divided into six tabs. This utility is actually very easy to use, so I won’t describe the process of reprogramming a button in detail.
The exclusive software to the scanner is supplied on one CD. The bundle includes:
- HP Photo & Imaging 2.2 control program (160MB);
- Presto BizCard 4.0 (38MB);
- Readiris Pro 8.0 (50MB);
- Acrobat reader (10MB).
The bracketed number is the amount of space on your hard disk drive each of these programs requires. Mark the huge size of the control program. Very large, it is far from perfect in terms of functionality. The program remains unchanged from model to model in spite of the numerous complaints of the users in topical forums. There exists an alternative, of course, but the commercial version of the driver for the Scanjet 8200 from ScannerDrivers (the company that develops drivers for almost every scanner) is going to cost you $100 more. The interface of the control program from HP looks like that:
And here’s the Scan Preferences screen with the basic settings:
I won’t describe the exclusive software from HP in detail since I found no significant changes or innovations there. You can refer to my earlier reviews for more details.
Now that we’ve learned what features the Scanjet 8200 has, we can try and test it.
