Microtek ScanMaker 4850 Scanner

This is,hands down, the most worthless piece of equipment I've ever had the misfortune to buy. Yeah, the reviews were pretty good and it has all the features I was looking for but, it refuses to work. The software is hard to navigate and, most of the time, locks my computer. Windows XP can't find the scanner. I give up. I've owned this pos for over a year and have yet to get one scan from it. Their website is equally useless. Do yourself a favor and look at HP or some other brand that actually functions. Now I have another money losing thing to try to dispose of.

I received this as a gift from my husband for Xmas '02 to replace my Visioneer flatbed that had started to scan in funny colors. Let me say that I really loved my Visioneer. First of all, the scanner installed pretty easily, no problems there. But... when I reboot XP, it takes 60 seconds just to boot the scanner before most of my other programs can load. Also, you have to manually open the ScanMaker 5 program and click the scanner control button and then close out of the program to get the light to go off. I wouldn't ever buy another one of these. I've also had a big problem with lint inside the machine under the glass, causing big problems with clean scans. I've tried about everything I can think of and still have the problem. I've even cleaned the glass on both sides with alcohol and newspaper! What a rip off. My advice is to stay far away from Microtek products.

Purchased Microtek ScanMaker 4850 in spite of reading all of the not so favorable reviews. I should have taken the reviews "very" seriously. I wasted alot of time installing and uninstalling the software because it just would not responding to my OPS, XP...Dell Computer, 512MB. Take the reviews seriously and don't waste your time!!!!