[Shelby] at Tech Tangents recently wrapped a project / obsession to obtain an old HP ScanJet 4C, get it running on a PC and put it through its paces. After after nearly five years, three scanners, and untold SCSI cards and drivers later, he finally succeeded. The first big problem was getting a working scanner. These don’t stand up well to shipping, and one arrived with broken mirrors. And when he finally got one that worked, sorting out SCSI controller and driver issues was surprisingly complicated, though ultimately successful.
The HP ScanJet 4C was introduced in 1995, and was notable for its scanning quality, its resolution ( 2400 DPI interpolated / 600 DPI optical ), and selling for under $1000. Except for replacement parts concerns, particularly the customized triphosphor fluorescent bulb assembly, it would still be a very competent scanner today. For this reason, [Shelby] will not be using it as his daily use scanner. Voters Card Id Number
Once everything was running smoothly, he makes a series of test scans at various settings, and compares them to scans made with a modern true 2400 DPI scanner. The verdict seems to be to ignore the built-in interpolation and scan at the 600 DPI resolution. He goes on to show the scanner running under modern Linux on a PC that has a PCI slot. The almost hour-long video wraps up by going over some of the cool design features, like the crazy optics path and the scanner’s three-line CCD built into a DIP package. To read more, check out this article in the Feb 1997 HP Journal which describing the scanner design.
Even if you aren’t planning on restoring an HP 4C, and [Shelby] advises against that, there is a lot of interesting and useful information about scanner technology in this video. Don’t let the running time scare you away, it’s quite engaging — as one commenter put it, “How the hell did you get me to watch a nearly hour long video about a 30yo scanner. Kudos“. Do you still use a scanner these days? Let us know in the comments below.
I keep mine around for when laying physical items on to scan like boards.
Still rocking a HP ScanJet 6200C in regular use. Not quite as old as the 4C. Back in the 90s during my first job I spent many thousands of pages worth of time with a ScanJet IIC with ADF. That thing earned it’s keep and made many thousands of dollars.
Evidently – they’re rather scant today.
Platens? Stepper motors? Those are for hipsters. Try a Marstek hand scanner. Just a sensor and a roller. No color. DOS only. And you needed an impossibly steady hand for it to work at all. The bundled OCR software worked well for the 3 or 4 lines of text it was capable of reading however.
Scsi sometimes works if you sacrifice a goat or two at the right time to the scsi gods…
so that’s what i had wrong! lambs will send you straight (back) to the inner circle of scsi hell
I used to use quite alot the Canon N670U he also shows in the video, but sadly its not worth the trouble to get working anymore, with the lack of 64 bit drivers. I used it few years ago to scan some PCBs to reverse engineer them back to gerber files. Nowadays I just use the office scanner / copier for it.
I gave my N670U away several years ago, was literally just wishing I still had it for board scanning… my phone storage is filled with PCB images!
It works with vuescan. I have one that I still use.
Due to work I use a scanner on pretty much a daily basis and some days a lot of it. The reason? Maintenance and documentation requirement. It might be 2023, but a lot of stuff that is brought in industry still comes with paper documentation, without the possibility do download from the company website. CE documentation? Scan. Thick manual? Cut off the back and scan. Convert to PDF and store on company network. I really wish a lot of default settings on big office type scanners wasn’t 300dpi and compressed to PDF as people in other companies doesn’t get that can make fine print unreadable.
It would have been so easy… Take a PCI SCSI card, Linux most likely supports it. Install SANE. SANE supports the HP 4c.
Ok, he does exactly that 35 minutes into the video.
Just a comment about the typo in the Story name. Extra T in ScanJet.
Well that scantly makes a difference ;)
I still have a scanner with USB that I use now and then. One of the more interesting use cases is that I scan a section of a tree (rings) for a CNC project. To exactly position a design I scan in the slab so that dpi is stored in a TIFF file. This usually is translated properly 1:1 in design software like photoshop and illustrator. I create a paper template that matches features in the slab so I can align it on the CNC axes and make the cut.
For example a section of a branch split can create nice asymatric patterns.
Using a scanner to scan is only secondary to making them play music. The best thing about these HP Scanjet 4Cs is that you can make them play music because the HP Scanner Control Language implementation of this scanner contains an unofficial PLAY TUNE command. The PLAY TUNE command varies the stepping rate of the stepper motor to produce audible frequencies. Similar to what has been done to floppy disk drive numerous times.
https://hackaday.com/2006/01/08/scanner-music/ https://web.archive.org/web/20061208215503/http://www.ganjatron.net/misc/scanjet/scanjet.html
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