At first blush, the HP is a good device. It scans film or slides at 2400 dpi. It will also scan prints upto 4x6.
HP claims to be interested in Linux, but this is a bad test case. They have no drivers for anything other than MS Windows. They have not released documents so that anyone else could write these drivers. It has been many years now (I bought the scanner in 1998) and I have given up hoping that HP will do something right.
I tried to use the scanner under vmware without success. So in short, the scanner is languishing. Next time, don't buy anything from HP without confirming they are releasing drivers (e.g. they seem to be much more sensible with many Deskjet printers).
I used it a bit using the Windows drivers. The defaults are a bit offensive (I guess they're targeting Windows lusers). The scanner crops off 5% of the frame by default; so for each frame you have to go and manually adjust window boundaries in order to not lose information. This is HCI at it's worst - first the software assumes I am stupid (i.e. that the peripheral 5% of all my pictures is trash), and then the software makes it extremely tedious for me to undo the damage (i.e. forces me to manually do it with GUI).
This was my first highres film scanner. I was astonished at how much dust is there on my slides. In the future, I'd want to FIRST scan in slides, before doing ANYTHING else with them. It's hard to get all the dust off. It'd be kinda neat to have good image processing software which removes the dust - I believe Nikon does a good job of that with the coolscan devices.
A useful thumb-rule is that using this scanner, each slide generates a file of 7-8 Meg. The colours are glorious.
Back up to These are a few of my favourite toys (my devices page)