Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This can only scan at 300dpi through the document feeder. That means you can't automatically scan a stack of documents at 600dpi. You'd have to use the flatbed one at a time, and that isn't an option for legal size. I suspect HP knows the document feeder is of low quality and precision, thus making 600 dpi impossible through the feeder. If that is the case, then one can expect the copying via document feeder will be limited to 300dpi. By contemporaneous standards that is a really bad low quality copier. To understand how bad, consider that it takes 600 dpi to do a decent copy of 300 dpi printed material. 300 dpi copying of 300 dpi material will result in noticeable degradation. The kicker is that most laser printers these days (even the cheapest ones) are 600 dpi. The TWAIN driver is one of the worst in the business - no image preview, and can't select scan area. The color mode and resolution settings (two most important attributes of a scan) are put on different UI tabs making them inconvenient to adjust and not easily visible. Contrast adjustment is in yet another place. Even the most simple adjustments hidden among different tabs and pull downs. The HP scanning software only allows saving to pdf and jpeg, with no way to select jpeg (or pdf image) quality. For scans initiated from the MFP, you can only choose color and greyscale (mislabeled on menus), no B/W. That makes it useless for most text document scanning. Even with the scanning software, if you set B/W the resulting file is still 10 times larger than it should be given the amount of lossless compression typically achievable with most text documents. (I tested this by scanning the same document in B/W with HP Scan vs Paperport software.) The next time you receive a very large email with a very simple document scan, you can blame it on this kind of incompetence. But it gets worse, as it seems HP uses jpeg to compress the "B/W" document scan. Jpeg is designed to compress natural photos where there tend to be gradual changes in luminosity (brightness). It is explicitly bad for text where one wants sharp letters (with very sudden changes between black letters and white background). So you wind up with bad jpeg artifacts. Sensible OEMs will do a real B/W scan and use Lempil-Ziv compression (like WinZip).