The 4300C is a fairly hefty scanner, although the overall design isn't unpleasant. It offers a choice of either USB or parallel interfaces. We tested it using the USB hook-up and the installation went very smoothly.

It comes with the Hewlett Packard PrecisionScan drivers, which are commendably easy to use from the perspective of a complete novice to the scanning game. All you have to do is press the scan button on the scanner and the 4300C will preview your image and bring up suggested resolution and colour settings, and with a further click you're away.

There's more than just a scan button on the front of the scanner though. Also ensconced here are the traditional copy and e-mail attachment buttons. A neat touch is an extra couple of buttons; one which switches between colour and black and white and another which can specify the number of copies (complete with an LCD display). Very smart.

More advanced users can play with the PrecisionScan software a bit. There are options to adjust the brightness and colour of a scanned image, but it's fairly limited in this respect, leaning more towards user-friendliness.

Other software bundled with the 4300C includes Corel Print House 2000 (a reasonable home publishing suite), Adobe ActiveShare (for photo management) and Trellix Web Design, so that's a thoroughly commendable software bundle overall.

Our test scans averaged at 50 seconds which was the fastest in the roundup, although the unit didn't fare as well when it came to scan quality. The test scan looked a bit washed out and the quality was relatively poor, unfortunately; this was the weakest effort from the scanners on test here.