PDF file size

[ObazaS]

I've come accross this several times in businesses using HP's.  Simple solution that seems to work:

If you have scan to USB Flash Disk option on the printer, try it.  It usually produces a PDF of a fraction of the size with no loss of quality.

[wkrasl]

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@ObazaS wrote:

I've come accross this several times in businesses using HP's.  Simple solution that seems to work:

If you have scan to USB Flash Disk option on the printer, try it.  It usually produces a PDF of a fraction of the size with no loss of quality.

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Thanks ObazaS.  I just tried it with a single test page but didn't not get the improvement (reduction) in size.  Let me kow if you had a different way to get your results.  Here is what I did:

1.  Inserted a spare flash drive in the slot on the lower front left panel of the printer, which turned on a confirmation / activity light above it, and switched the upper front right panel to show options to "Print Photos" or "Scan to Memory Device." 

2. Inserted a single page which included a color image plus b&w text in the feeder.

3. Selected the scan option, leaving the defaults for doc type "PDF Color" and resolution "300 dpi," and hit "Start Scan."

4.  After scanning completed, I removed the flash drive and inserted into a port on my Windows 10 Pro laptop.

5.  I then scanned the same page with HP Printer Assistant, with the same 300 dpi color choices, saving into the same HPSCANS folder on the flash drive that was created by the printer.

The direct printer to flash drive pdf is 997 KB.  The printer assistant scan pdf is 925 KB.  I toggled back and forth between them to try to see any difference in clarity, but they were identical as far as I could tell.

I then repeated the direct printer to flash drive to see if I missed anything, but there were no options for choosing  file size vs image quality going direct to flash drive.  It just did another scan at whatever default is set, with the second time coming in at 1001 KB.

I then checked my printer assistant settings under the advanced settings "File" tab, and see it has been unchanged since my original experimentation, with the slider about 3/4 towards "Best Quality.  Back when i was testing, if I set it any lower than that, I would lose an unacceptable amount of image detail. If I set it any higher the file sizes got much larger without improving image quality. 

Bottom line, your difference might be due to having your slider set further (perhaps all the way) towards "Best Quality."  Let me know if you still get smaller PDFs direct to flash drive vs. printer assistant PDFs with the slider where I have it.

 

[Leo2016]

If you are trying to scan B&W into pdf document there is a bug in the HP software.  I looked into this back in the middle of the year.  I spent over an hour with tech support and they told me they would escallate to engineering.  Didn't hear anything further from them.

The hardware and drivers are fine.  It is the software that encodes the scans into PDF that has a bug and is not encoding the B&W images the most efficient way.   On the older HPs and with othe software a B&W page takes about 40k.  I was getting huge scans with the s/w on the 8620.  They probably ship the same software with multiple models.  Color scans are fine.

I think this is a serious defect since many people are using this to archive documents or scan /email to customers.  The scans generated are effectively useless at the sizes generated.

You can see the more detailed response I provided here

http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Scanning-Faxing-and-Copying/Scan-to-PDF-files-too-large-Why-Solution-fo...

You would think since I already did the work to identify the specific issue that HP would be able to do something about it.

Solutions:

- Buy other scanning software such as Paperport.  I downloaded the trial and it generated the correct size pdf files.

- Download public domain scanning software

Since I have a background in software I ended up just writing my own scanning program to scan and encode B&W pdf documents. I am now getting pdf files with about 40k/page.  The scanner and feeder work great.  Just a shame the software shipped is miserable.

[wglacombe]

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@Leo2016 wrote:

If you are trying to scan B&W into pdf document there is a bug in the HP software.  I looked into this back in the middle of the year.  I spent over an hour with tech support and they told me they would escallate to engineering.  Didn't hear anything further from them.

The hardware and drivers are fine.  It is the software that encodes the scans into PDF that has a bug and is not encoding the B&W images the most efficient way.   On the older HPs and with othe software a B&W page takes about 40k.  I was getting huge scans with the s/w on the 8620.  They probably ship the same software with multiple models.  Color scans are fine.

I think this is a serious defect since many people are using this to archive documents or scan /email to customers.  The scans generated are effectively useless at the sizes generated.

You can see the more detailed response I provided here

http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Scanning-Faxing-and-Copying/Scan-to-PDF-files-too-large-Why-Solution-fo...

You would think since I already did the work to identify the specific issue that HP would be able to do something about it.

Solutions:

- Buy other scanning software such as Paperport.  I downloaded the trial and it generated the correct size pdf files.

- Download public domain scanning software

Since I have a background in software I ended up just writing my own scanning program to scan and encode B&W pdf documents. I am now getting pdf files with about 40k/page.  The scanner and feeder work great.  Just a shame the software shipped is miserable.

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So how do you change the HP scanning software to Paperport or similar if that's what I decide to do?