HP Scanjet G3110

The G3110 first piqued our interest because of some very negative comments on HP's own forum.  The three users to post comments were so negative that we became suspicious--perhaps it was some not-so-subtle negative publicity from a competitor?

Well, we were right to be dubious: although it's far from an exceptional scanner, the G3110 is a perfectly reasonable model for this price bracket, and is nothing like as bad as the comments on HP's site suggest.  So, the moral of the story is: don't believe everything you read that's been written anonymously online--not everybody has good intentions!

Just to give you an idea, we'll give you a little flavour of what was said in case HP decides to tidy up the page in question.  One unhappy user complains of a 'dreadfully slow' scanner with 'blurry results'.  Another says that 'everything it did made Vista' crash, something we didn't find at all when we tested in with Windows Vista.  The third commentator, who also give the scanner a rating of 1/5, was just as insistent that this scanner was slow and bad at digitising negatives.  The only part of that that's true is that HP hasn't managed to produce a good negative scanner.  If that's what you need to do, look elsewhere, as it really isn't the G3110's strong point.


As well as scanning negatives, the scanner has four hotkeys that allow you to scan directly to PDF or e-mail a scanned document as an attachment.  Note that it uses 14.2 W while scanning and 2.9 W on standby.

Speed

The scanning software closes automatically after each scan, which means you need to open it for every page you want to digitise.  And every time you start it up, it automatically begins with a prescan, whether you ask for one or not.  It takes a little under 13 seconds to do that once it's warmed up, which can take quite a while.  In reality, though, this 'prescan' is in actual fact the scan itself.  When you're in low resolutions, that becomes obvious as soon as the document appears on screen.  At resolutions between 75 and 300 dpi, the final version appears almost instantly. 

Once you move to higher resolutions, the scanner begins to struggle.  Scanning a stamp at 2400 dpi took over 1 minute 15 seconds, something Epson's scanners can do it in only 42 seconds.   This scanner doesn't just do documents, though, but also negatives and slides--but very slowly.  It took over two minutes to scan a negative at 1200 dpi.  That's far too long, given that Canon has scanners that can do the same in 31 seconds.

Quality

The sharpness option is hidden in the 'retouch' menu and has four different levels.  After trying them all, we prefer the medium option; go any higher and colours are too accentuated, but below that they aren't pushed far enough.

Original	Scanner
What to look out for: Orange tones that are hard to reproduce, details in the hair, skin tones.	96 dpi The wood looks orange, but the colours are lively and attractive.
What to look out for: Details in the hair, skin tones.	300 dpi The face is lighter than it should be, and the skintones in the boy's cheeks aren't even.
What to look out for: You should be able to see eyelashes and eyebrows.	600 dpi   Individual details are less well-handled and lots of areas look blurry.

This scanner clearly really struggles with scanning negatives.  Dark colours are lost in a sea of black, there's too much contrast and the end result is scans that you just can't use.