Why is it that nobody can make a scanner that doesn't make me want to go Office Space on it's ass? I've used a ton of different scanners and every single time it's the same thing, press the scan button and pray to the scanner gods while sacrificing a virgin in the hope that this time it will finally work. Do you know how hard it is to find a good computer tech only to turn around and offer them up as a sacrifice on their first day? If I have to scan any more pictures HR is going to kill me.
It's not really the hardware that's the problem. It's the god awful driver software. I had to install an HP scanner the other day and the driver software was a 150MB download! Adobe Photoshop CS3 in it's entirety is 150MB by the way. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. I don't need the scanner software to do image editing, cataloging, email, or make slide shows. I just need it to scan the image and send it to the computer quickly and without locking up the whole computer.
What they need to do is make scanners show up as a mass storage device. Memory is cheap these days, just scan the image to some internal memory then I can copy the files over to my computer as easy as copying a file. Have a nice user menu on the front that lets me adjust the DPI and image type and I wouldn't even have to install any software on my computer. If you're feeling fancy you could throw in a setting that could enable/disable auto-cropping and it would be the perfect scanner.
No one buys a scanner because of the software that it comes with so stop adding features, it's just making the quality of your software go down.