HP Scanjet G4050

Product Survey: Scanners

The Scanjet G4050 is a more advanced version of the G3110, and, in theory, its main advantage is its increased colour depth, up from 48 bits to 96. As a result, it should be able to scan a wider range of negatives and slides than its less expensive little brother. We'll save you time by telling you straight away that this scanner doesn't present any serious competition for the G3110. Adding more colour just makes it slower, and it's still useless at scanning slides and negatives, which it completely ruins. And although, in quantitative terms, the colours it produces aren't that far away from the ideal results, reds are way off the mark which ruins skin tones and produces very odd scans. In short, it comes at the same price as a professional scanner, but offers none of the benefits. Producing a prescan of a document is fast and only takes 12 seconds. What's less impressive is the time it takes to warm up in between each scan, during which time the software automatically closes. If you've got a lot of documents to scan, you'll need to be patient. When doing the actual scan itself, the timing is decent but nothing wonderful as long as you stick to low resolutions.