The latest on the Hewlett Packard 4670 scanner:

I emailed the CEO and Prsident of Hewlett Packard, Mark Hurd, from their website to ask them to update the drivers for this wonderful scanner, so that I can use it again with my Apple Mac. I had an email back from Customer relations asking for a few more details. Actually I was surprised. I thought I’d get a, “Sorry, this product is no longer supported,” email if I was lucky.

Then this morning I received a phone call from them. They explained that the machine was out of warranty so if it was broken I would have to pay to get it fixed. I told them it worked fine on windows (although not with their scanning software – I had to download the Gimp to make it work.)

So later I got a technical guy phoning me for further details. I don’t think he knew the product really and didn’t quite understand the problem. But I ws quite impressed that they took the time to phone at all.

The scanner is quite unique. I imagine they stopped making it because it is easily misused and they probably got loads of people asking for their money back after their kids had dropped it on the floor. But it is quite brilliant for scanning things that are not sheets of A4 paper. You place the sscanner on top of the thing you want to scan and, as you can see through it, you can line it up just how you want it.

Looking at forums online, it has a great and passionate following. all of whom can’t them them to work with modern macs. The drivers were written for Power PC chips and macs are now intel. If the software were made to run on Rosetta, that would help. It’s not an old machine and if they built a replacement, I would upgrade. But they don’t, so I have to make do. As they don’t make a replacement, I feel they should still support it, especially as it was heavily marketed at the Apple Mac user.

I know stuff gets old, but if you are not going to make a new version, please let us keep our old scanners going, HP. It would be criminal to have to throw away a perfectly good machine. at least can we have third party TWAIN drivers? It’s the chip change that is at the bottom of it all.