Hewlett-Packard Australia ScanJet N6310

The HP ScanJet N6310 is a flatbed document scanner.

A good impression is left by HP ScanJet N6310's cream and curved styling, although we weren't quite as enthused by the installation routine. A lengthy reload fixed these problems, although it's not the first time we've experienced problems with HP's gargantuan routines recently.

Besides normal paper documents and business cards, the HP ScanJet N6310 can handle 35mm slides and negatives. A 50-sheet feeder takes in significant numbers of documents at a time, although you will need to make sure it's fitted properly.

As a document scanner the HP ScanJet N6310 didn't perform as well as hoped given the bumper price tag. You can turn documents into one of a number of formats, principally Jpegs, Tiffs and Adobe PDF files. You can even create PDFs that are fully searchable for text, providing you scan at 300dpi resolution.

We stocked up the HP ScanJet N6310 with the same bundle of assorted letters and bills that we used with the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510. The HP ScanJet N6310 needed 3 minutes 25 seconds to scan the documents, and another 2 minutes 12 seconds to turn the images into searchable files. This is significantly longer than the Fujitsu.

The quality is good though, and even complicated magazine pages gave the HP ScanJet N6310 no problems. Here it did trump the Fujitsu, even if we would have liked to have had a faster mode.

When you scan documents as image files you get a little more versatility and the ability to crank up the speed. And the HP ScanJet N6310's built-in flatbed allows you to work with delicate material that you'd rather not see being sucked through the mechanism.

While quality is very good for documents, you won't want to make frequent use of the HP ScanJet N6310 as a full-fledged flatbed. Speed is very good, requiring just 27 seconds to reproduce an A4 picture at a resolution of 300dpi, but the scan reproduction is lacking at the top end.

Colours aren't entirely faithful, and compared to many a standalone flatbed we've seen, the end product simply isn't good enough. The HP ScanJet N6310's design is also slightly flawed, with a heavy lid frequently crashing down before we had the document in place.