The Sleeker Scanner

By Anita Hamilton

Scanners have long been the neglected devices of the PC world--clunky boxes that take up far too much space on the desktop. With its new ScanJet 4670, Hewlett-Packard is giving the humble machine a much needed makeover.

The first thing you notice about the scanner is that it looks more like a picture frame than a computer gadget. You simply drop a photo between the 4670 and its book-stand-like holder, then watch through the transparent center as the image sensor moves across your photo.

The breakthrough is in the device's space-saving design. While a normal scanner lies flat and can take up more than a square foot of desktop space, the 4670 has the footprint of a medium-size dictionary and stands at a 45DEG angle.

If you want to get a digital image of a book or anything else too wide to wedge between the scanner and its holder, you can just lay the scanner flat on top of the object. Two buttons let you send images straight to the printer or to a free online photo album at hpphoto.com

Where the 4670 stumbles is with the included software. The image-editing tools, used to touch up pictures once you have scanned them, can be complicated. The Instant Share feature, which lets you scan and e-mail pictures on the fly, doesn't allow you to crop pictures before you send them. And the Panorama Maker program, which is supposed to let you scan segments of large things like maps and posters and then "stitch" the images back into a coherent whole, doesn't always reassemble the images quite right.

Better is the ReadIris Pro optical-character-recognition software, which converts a scanned letter or magazine article into editable text onscreen. It's fast and simple to use, and the only text it had trouble deciphering was newspaper print.

Available in November for $199, the ScanJet 4670 isn't the cheapest scanner in its class. Canon, Epson and even HP sell models with the same 2,400-dots-per-inch resolution and 48-bit color for $150 or less. But its breakthrough design makes it worth the splurge.

Questions for Anita? E-mail her at hamilton@time.com