A few weeks ago I bought an HP Officejet J5780 All-in-One (copier, printer, scanner, and fax) primarily to photocopy 13 years worth of tax returns.The convenience of a decent little in-house photocopier cannot be overstated!
It was easy to then hook it up to my Mac as a printer (though the printing performance lags behind the speed and photo quality of the Businessjet 1200 I'd been using).
But things went downhill rapidly when I tried to set up the scan function. The software disk that came with the J5780 refused to install the software (it got into a loop that kept asking me to agreed to install some "customer updates" software). Then, the software I found on the HP site (after some really annoying searching) and downloaded, also had a nasty little loop and wouldn't install.
I spent a few days monkeying with this, and getting increasing steamed. Finally I Googled the problem and found a long discussion about similar frustrations at MacRumors, ending with a link to a page on the HP site with some universal software for HPs that, when downloaded installed, solved the scanning problem. The J5780 turns out to be quite a nice scanner, too.
I'm astonished to find that I'm using the copier on a daily basis. Now I need to splurge and pick up a second printer cable so I can have both printers hooked up at the same time. Oooh!
When I have wacky scanner problems (particularly with the software that comes with a new scanner), I find most of them are solved by using Vuescan instead.
ReplyDeleteGood luck with your new scanner!