HP ScanJet 8250 Document Scanner

We use the 8250 in a small office with 3 employees. We scan our mail daily and use it for larger jobs as well. Most scanning is letter sized black and white pages. The software that HP packaged with the scanner was worthless. Unbelievably, the driver was 100s of megs and even at that did not work properly. Luckily, we discovered on HP's website a small "commercial" driver for the 8250. This driver stripped out the "bells and whistles." We used that driver for about 6 months. The problem was our actual scanning speed using the "commercial" driver was only 4 pages per minute. Finally, HP updated the commercial driver and now we are getting about 13 pages a minute, which is acceptable for us.

The ADF does not jam as often as other scanners we have owned. We dab alcohol on the roller when it starts to act up. I have an HP 6110; Epson 1200U, and the 8250. All feed well. I have returned the Fujitsu ScanSnap and a Microtek scanner, because neither could feed properly. My rule now, is that I will not buy a scanner that I do not already own, unless I can test its ADF.

After reading the review "correction and complaint" I was trying to figure out where this person was coming from. He/she is incorrect on all their points.

1) The color rendition is incredible and looks nearly identical to the item scanned.

2) You do not have to choose the image size. When I scan a letter document, the scanner knows it. And when I scan a legal document, it knows that too. I don't even know how to trick the thing.

3) As for the grayscale having to be chosen every time: Under "scan settings" you can choose your default settings. You can tell it to default to 1 bit or 8 bit grayscale, or many different color options. This will be the default setting if you elect not to change them every time you scan.

I wonderered if this reviewer had just opened the box and didn't bother to read the manual or play with the software settings before posting. Or maybe he's a Canon person.

Oh well. Just thought I'd dispell some untruths on the scanjet 8250. In my opinion and use, it has been a great, full featured scanner!

I bought a refurbished Scanjet 8250 for $80 in Aug 2008, figuring that even if it didn't work, I'd only be out $80 rather than the original price of $800. Anyway, I have owned HP automatic-document-feeder scanners before (most recently the Scanjet 5550c w/single-sided ADF), so I alreay knew all about the quirky, slow, and clunky HP scanner software. Out of the (refurbished) box, the included original driver/software (HP Imaging 2.2) did not work with my Windows XP Pro SP3 Pentium 4 2.4 GHz Thinkpad. There were various errors and crashes, even after patching with the latest updates from the HP website. Thankfully, there was a completely new set of drivers/software dated May 2007 (HP Solution Center), which did end up working just fine, though it thought the scanner was an 8270 for some reason. Yes, HP's new software (just like the old software) is well over 100 MB and is still slow and clunky, but it includes an image/picture manager w/rudimentary photo editing features. If you don't want to deal with HP software, then HP provides a much slimmer TWAIN driver that includes most or all of the scanners features, though you wouldn't be able to use the scanner front panel buttons. You can use a third-party document manager such as PaperPort with the TWAIN drivers. I chose to install and use both sets of drivers/software. Anyway, after 2 weeks of use, the ADF hasn't yet jammed on me (from my experience with the HP 5550c ADF scanner, jams are fairly rare and that scanner has kept working for 5 years straight now). The front panel buttons are convenient and very customizable, so I've assigned each button for particular common scanning tasks I do (e.g grey scale 200dpi PDF, grey scale 300dpi for OCR, color 300dpi for scanning 4x6 prints, etc). Of course, you can use the software to do the same things, but the buttons speed things up.. Overall, once you get used to the software and configure it to do what you want, you will find that this is a very capable machine. I look forward to many years of service from this HP scanner.