Although the 3570C is a well priced scanner with some useful features, it's a bit of a curate's egg when it comes to image quality and performance.

When used to capture opaque images from paper documents such as photographs and magazine pages, or when capturing text from books, the scanner produces good quality scans. However, it's not so good when it comes to scanning slides or film. Although opaque colour scans display sharp focus, the colours appear to be a little washed out, not quite as saturated as they should be.

This is perhaps a response to previous scanners from HP, which tended to err in the other direction, producing over-saturated colours. However, it's nothing that can't be sorted out with a few tweaks in an image editor.

Slides and negative scans are also less than perfect; slides take on a soft focus while negatives appear to be out of focus, with distorted colours. The scanner makes a much better job of opaque greyscale images and preserves contrasts well, but introduces slight pixelisation on fine detail. Its scanning time performance is average, which is disappointing as it doesn't seem to make full use of its fast USB 2.0 interface.

Feature-wise, the 3570C has some nice details; when you begin a transparency scan, the backlight turns on automatically. There's a grooved plastic strip above the backlight to hold 35mm film and slides, but care must be taken when loading slides to avoid damaging them. To aid in scanning from thick documents or books, the lid slides up on a good set of hinges, or can be removed completely.

HP supplies its own Photo & Imaging (P&I) software with the 3570C. This comprises Director, allowing scans to go direct to the printer or another application, along with Image Editor which allows basic image editing to be done. HP backs the 3570C with a one year hardware warranty.

If you only need to digitize opaque documents, the Scanjet 3570C will do the job easily, providing good quality images at a reasonable price. It's less impressive at handling transparencies, though.