HP Scanjet G4050

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.



Speed

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.  It takes around 10 seconds to scan a 4 x 6'' colour photo at 300 dpi.

With larger documents, things begin to drag, with an A4 page taking a very long 1 minute 40 seconds, again at 300 dpi.  Higher resolutions take even longer: scanning a postage stamp at 1200 dpi takes over a minute, and you'll need 2 minutes 45 seconds to do it at 2400 dpi.

Scanning negatives is no quicker, and you need to wait a long time while the scanner warms up and does a pressman.  Getting a scan at 1200 dpi then takes another 1 minute 20 seconds.

Image Quality

We started by using a weak correction to improve the level of detail in the interface.  We chose the 'medium' level; any higher setting brought out too much inaccurate detail.

Original	Scanner
What to look out for: Orange tones that are hard to reproduce, details in the hair, skin tones.	96 ppp The wood looks orange
What to look out for: Details in the hair, skin tones.	300 ppp The scanned image could be sharper
What to look out for: You should be able to see eyelashes and eyebrows.	600 ppp The eyelashes are there, but the whole photo is a little blurry

The effect on the quality of scanned documents isn't always that obvious though.  On our stamps, the results are very hard to spot, and almost invisible. 

Without sharpness mode	With sharpness mode

Let's take a look at the accuracy of the colours.  On the top row is the result produced by the G4050 when it scanned our test card, while the bottom row shows the idle result: