OS/2 e-Zine! - Hewlett Packard ScanJet 5P

Hewlett Packard ScanJet 5P - by Bob Smith

In the August 1996 issue of OS/2 Magazine, Esther Schindler wrote an exceptional article on the use of scanners under OS/2. She reviewed four flat bed scanners, along with their associated software. Her advice to prospective scanner owners was to purchase an HP scanner, since at that time, "every piece of image-scanning software (for OS/2 or Windows) supports the HP scanners first".

My son has an HP 4C scanner which the USAF allows him to use at home, and while I was very enthused about the capabilities of the 4C, the price (about US$900) was far beyond my means. In January, while shopping at Price-Costco (a discount store which carries almost everything) I spotted an HP ScanJet 5P for $370 on sale. My wife quickly twisted my arm and the purchase was made on the spot.

Another article in the now-deceased OS/2 Magazine, "The Scanning Story", by J.C. Love (in the January 1997 issue) strongly advised that if one could afford it, regular SCSI adapters should be used rather than the included HP adapters which do not meet the full SCSI standard.

Love also advised purchasing ImageScan/2 by Danmar Systems or CopyShop/2 by Trafalgar Business Systems since the HP scanning software included with the scanner will not run under WIN-OS2. I contacted Farrel Company (the authorized distributor for Danmar) and purchased an Adaptec adapter, cable, software and most importantly, an OS/2 driver for the whole operation.

Installation

Installation of the adapter is straightforward: open the box, find an empty slot and insert. In my case, since I had also purchased a new Matrox video card, two birds would be gotten with one swing. Unfortunately, I discovered that the PCI bus on my motherboard was version 0.0000-something and current PCI cards would not run on it; a new motherboard was required. So the scanner sat in its shipping container until all of the various parts came together at the same time.

One bad thing about using the included SCSI card is that there are no jumpers on the card to change the interrupt being used from the default of IRQ5. I've been told, though, that with the Symbios drivers (SYM416.ADD) installed in the CONFIG.SYS, you use the following switches to change the IRQ:

BASEDEV=SYM416.ADD /OVERRIDE /IRQ=12 /V /Q
(The /OVERRIDE switch turns off the Plug'N'Play. The /IRQ switch is self explanatory)

Also, the cable included by HP will not work with most other SCSI cards. The problem with using third party SCSI adapters, of course, is that you need one more driver. A driver is needed for OS/2 to communicate with the SCSI adapter. A second driver adds additional device management through the ASPI interface defined by Adaptec which provides the connection between the SCSI driver and the third driver, the scanner driver. SCSIScan/2 provided by Danmar with the ImageScan/2 software works quite well and was able to see the HP 5P even though Farrel told me that they had not tested the 5P yet (they hadn't even seen one at that point).

Using the Equipment

Once I had the third party SCSI card in and the scanner physically attached, the rest of the installation went well. Using ImageScan/2 I was able to easily scan photos. A bit of experimentation was necessary to get the color balance right, but it wasn't too difficult. Using PMView, I was able to convert the scanned images of my cat and dog to BMPs to have as my desktop background in minutes.

The scanner itself is a legal/letter-sized flat bed. One really nice feature is that the base is recessed in back so even though you attach a power cable and data cable to the rear of the unit, you can still put the scanner right against the wall, thus saving a couple of inches of desk space; usually very valuable real estate!

One problem which I found was that the cable ends are not the same as for the HP 4P and 5P, so when Farrel sent me the cable, of course, it ended up being the wrong one. Farrel was very good about sending me a new cable and taking the old one back though (with shipping costs on them -- quite good customer service at Farrel!).

Overall Quality

The OS/2 scanning software is not yet up to the quality of HP's included software which runs under Win3.1 and Win95. For one thing, OCR is not included (but can be obtained with a separate program). Further, under Win95, one only has to push a button on the front of the scanner to launch the scanning software and start scanning an image. This is not the case with the OS/2 software.

Conclusion

The HP 5P appears to be a very good scanner with at least 400dpi resolution. The cost, at US$370, is a definite improvement over the HP4P/C but additional costs will be incurred getting OS/2 drivers. In my opinion, it's still a bargain for those who need a scanner and want to use it natively with OS/2.

Hewlett Packard ScanJet 5P
by Hewlett-Packard
MSRP: US$370.00

Bob Smith is a 15 year veteran of the USAF as a Transport Pilot and Planner; he has also spent 15 years in Fire Service in a small California community. He retired as Fire Chief in 1995 and has been using OS/2 since v2.0.

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