HP 4570C ScanJet Scanner

Owned the 4570c for a while. Avoid the bundled driver software if you can. The latest version, v2.0, downloads a mere 238MB (that's right "MB"!). It runs turtle speed, making a nice USB 2.0 scanner seem like it's USB 0.002.

Plugging into XP machine (my laptop), I let Microsoft find the driver. It downloaded and installed WIA-HP, a twain driver that is menial (very limited controls) but operates with considerably improved speed under my applications... a big time saver if you've got a pile of doc's to scan.

My home desktop is still Win2KPro. I've had no luck getting the WIA-HP driver to run on it, unfortunately.

Drivers have to be reinstalled repeatedly. Finally got it up and running only to have the lamp burn out.

We bought an HP 4570C to scan documents and convert them to PDF documents. When we bought scanner we were using Win98SE. Although the software was clumsy (at best) it did work. We have since bought new computers P4's running Win XP Pro SP2. We downloaded software from HP and tried to get thing working. We have spent over 40 hours of time trying. We have used the HP on line chat tech support. We have installed/uninstalled software (over 10 times!), patches, even software for other scanners (5590 at HP's direction) to no avail. The software flat doesn't work with Windows XP Pro SP2. We hve tried it on three different computers all with the same results, BAD! HP refuses to stand buy their product and insist that it works. It is sad that a once great company is totally irresponsible to say this scanned works with Windows XP Pro. We will never again buy any HP product.

Avoid this scanner if you own a Macintosh. The scanning hardware is quite good, but the software is truly awful.

As near as I can tell, it is largely incompatible with MacOS X 10.3 at any functional level. TWAIN scanning into Photoshop CS is not functional. The "HP Director" software barely works, it is often unsuccessful attempting to launch other applications to do its bidding, especially when trying to set preferences.

Using the copy machine functionality to scan and print, doesn't appear to work with my HP printer, as the scanning software complains about the image being too wide (before it even starts scanning) which isn't the case.

I'm still trying to get it to reliably scan a document without "surprises" and I haven't even looked at the other features.

I'm a power user, and know my way around OS X.

The HP software is horrific.

I have used the 4570C intensively for over a year and have had no problems whatsoever. Why there are so many complaints about the software is a mystery to me. It takes ten minutes to install and off you go. The only problem I've encountered is that when you scan a photo from a book but have scanner set to slides (which I also scan), you get lots of horizontal lines until you fix the problem. The troubleshooting technique in manual resolves this issue, irksome though it may be, in just a few minutes. My picture files take up about 14 gigabytes on my hard drive so you know I have been using the 4570 intensively. I would buy another one for my lab but Best Buy quit selling them.