SCANNER

In the age of the $100 color flatbed scanner, you have to do something special

to justify a $299 price tag. Hewlett-Packard tried to add enough intelligence

to its ScanJet 5100C to make complex scanning tasks easy. The unit analyzes

all elements on a page and adjusts its settings on the fly as it makes a

single pass. This will save time if you want to re-create pages with art and

text-magazine and newspaper articles, for example. But you'll pay a heavy

premium for what turns out to be an inexact science.

The look-alike successor to the ScanJet 5P, the 5100C is...