An excellent scanner for small business use.

I purchased the Hewlett Packard 5590 Flatbed scanner nearly two years ago to use in a small business office which is highly technical oriented. This machine is hooked up to a Windows XP Pro machine which is connected to a small local network. The initial software installation went off without a hitch. My hope was to use this machine on a daily basis as well as convert all the offices paper documents to digital copies and then do away with the metal filing cabinets. A bonus would be to be able to send all the archived paper documents out to clients via email and to cut down on snail mail if at all possible. I was counting on a huge savings here, to say the least. In fairness, it took nearly 7 months of dedicated scanning to convert all the paper files to digital files, but was worth it! Today, as paper files come in, they are converted to digital immediately. Access to all the old paper files is nearly instantaneous now because they are on the hard drive which is shared among the other computers in the office. This is a slick feature.

When we initially started to scan old paper files, we learned that flatbed scanners do not like paperclips and staples. It is imperitive that you remove both before running them through the document feeder. This scanner has the duplex feature, so it will do front and backs of each document. After doing many thousands of documents I can say without reservation that it will choke on about 5% of the old paper files which have a machine fold on them. It gets past the top and middle of the page fold but when it comes to the last fold on the page, down toward the bottom, it will occasionally stop. When this happens it requires a delicate touch to gently pull the document back out of the document feeder without tearing the paper. I have noticed that the 3-fold paper will go through the document feeder without a hitch if it is printed on heavier paper. Like I said, most of the jams occur with older, thin paper which has been in a filing cabinet for years. Every so often we do go to Hewlett Packard's download site and check for software updates. Most of the updates occured the first year of use.

I have viewed many other reviews of this particular machine and have wondered why so many people are not pleased with it's performance. For our part, it is one of the most used pieces of office equipment and definitely one of the most valuable in our office. I would not take for it. It does what it is supposed to do and ultimately that is how I measure anything.