Review of the HP Scanjet 3000 Professional Document Scanner

The HP Scanjet Professional 3000 Document Scanner is a high-speed and surprisingly heavy-duty sheet-fed scanner. It comes with a full suite of scanning software which makes it right for a lot of different uses. I wasn't impressed too much with the business-card software, which did an okay job with lots of cards but still left me plenty of editing to do. But I was impressed that the scanner seemed nearly unjammable--I fed in a stack of oddly sized business cards, some very thick and some very thin, and the scanner handled them efficiently and quickly. The Scanjet Professional 3000 isn't cheap but it is a good buy.

The HP Scanjet Professional 3000 Sheet-fed Document Scanner handled some heavy-duty tasks impressively. For me, scanning a stack of business cards quickly and accurately is a test of how well a sheet-fed scanner is going to perform, and the 3000 handled them without any issues. That's particularly, given that my assortment of nearly 200 business cards came in every shape, thickness, size, and even clarity (some were printed on an almost transparent plastic). I could stack more than a dozen in the feed at one time, and the scanner pulled them through without an error and without a paper jam.

That was impressive, as I say. Fewer kudos go to NewSoft Presto! BizCard6, the business-card OCR software that comes with the scanner (in fact, the scanner comes with four CDs of software, including Nuance OmniPage 17, which handles most document scanning tasks). Certainly I challenged the business-card software, since the cards were in several languages, but while it sometimes performed admirably, more often it made small mistakes that forced me to edit the results. Some were understandable; others, such as the inability to read an open or close parenthesis that is frequently found around international phone numbers, were not so easy to forgive.

The scanner is lightning fast (about three seconds per page!) and the results are very good. As I noted with other HP ScanJet document scanners, there's not much information included about the various software included--three CDs that include Nuance PaperPort, Nuance OmniPage, and NewSoft Presto! BizCard Reader software. Apart from the issues with the business-card software, the OCR worked well and I like being able to scan into a wide variety of file types, from .bmp to .ppt to .xps and everything in between.

The scanner's biggest drawback is that at close to $500, the Scanjet Professional 3000 doesn't come cheap--it's in a class with the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500, which arguably did a better job (at least on business cards). That's enough to take away a star from this otherwise excellent scanner. The scanner's specs also note that it's compatible with PCs running Windows as well as with Mac OS X v 10.5, v 10.6.

Disclosure: Review samples were provided by the manufacturer. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.