Forums | MacLife

Ok, so I bought an HP 5500c scanner a few weeks ago, and finally found the time to have a major scanning session today, so I thought that I would provide some feedback for anyone who is researching a scanner.

The HP 5500c is the one with the auto-photo feeder on top of it, that sucks in photos and scans them automatically a lot like the auto-feed on photocopies.  It retails for $299 and is basically the same scanner as the 4570, but with the auto-photo feeder lid, instead of a basic lid.

I am quite happy with this scanner.  We scanned about 300 photos today in about 3 hours, thanks to the auto-feeder.  I stacked 30 photos at a time in there, and about 15 minutes later they are all scanned.  Of course, like with any auto-feeder, the photos have to be flat, without bends and fed in there just right.  Even with really old photos that have that natural photo warp to them, though, it is still much easier to guide each photo into the auto-feeder with a little help than it would be to placing each photo on the scanbed manually.  If the photos are in good shape, I was able to regularly get 15 or 20 in a row to feed in without any external guidance from me.  I also noticed that the first 15 or 20 in a stack of 30 photos got sucked in without help from me, but the last 5 or 10 photos in the stack usually would need a nudge.  Kinda weird, but my solution was to keep sticking 20 more photos in the back when the stack got thin.

One disadvantage of the auto-feeder is that the feeder coveyor is exposed to the scan bed, instead of a pure white background, so you are always scanning the photo, plus the conveyor belt.  That means that any auto-cropping tools will not work, since they will include the scan of the conveyor system, but that is ok though, because I found myself getting into a groove of scanning 30 photos, and while those are humming through the machine automatically, I am in iPhoto importing, cropping and rotating the scanned photos.  I got into a groove where every 15 minutes, a complete batch of 30 photos got scanned and processed through iPhoto.  I had no problem running iPhoto and the scanning with the HP software at the same time, and I have about 3,000 photos in my iPhoto library.

A major disadvantage of this scanner is that the OS X drivers have a major flaw that will cause the computer to run slower and slower until eventually it causes a kernel panic.  However, on my 867 DP Powermac, this has usually taken 24 to 36 hours of having the scanner hook up before the computer starts to run slow, but then again, I do have 1.5 GB RAM too.  Durring a scan session, that might last a few hours, the problems with the drivers and machine slow down were unnoticeable on my machine.  Then, at the end of the scan session, I unplug the scanner and reboot the computer, and everything is fine.  Although this is a pain in the butt, I think that the scanner is worth it, for how easy the autofeeder is going to make my scanning project.  I was running Aquamon in the background while I was scanning today, and my processor usuage never got above about 20% and my memory usuage was quite constant at about 600 megs while scanning with iPhoto open.

My wife and I are planning on scanning about 1,500 - 2,000 photos from the last 10 years.  Based on my first session today, it looks like that will take about 6 or 7 session of 3 hours or so each, thanks to this HP scanner.  I remember some of my scanning sessions a few years back where I had to place every photo on the scan bed, preview, drag the crop box, scan, repeat.  There is no way I could scan 2,000 photos with that type of scanner without going insane.  So overall, I am thrilled with this scanner, despite some of the negatives mentioned above.