This new, all-in-one machine has a dedicated slide/negative scanner built in to the lid. I refill the ink myself using refillables from eBay and it saves a bundle on originals whilst maintaining excellent print quality (just an aside).

My problem is the negative scanner only produces a strip-scan of the negatives, at whatever resolution required, and then saves it as a Jpeg. I can't see any way to split up the images individually to save and print. Very poor software on the part of HP. Surely slide scanners are meant to present scans of the individual pictures? And this badly-designed machine is top-of-the-range for multifunctions, costing £300 in the UK. There are no software updates on this. Thanks for any tips on how to separate the images.

Open the JPG file in photo editing software. Use the software's Crop Tool to "crop" the first picture. Select FILE > SAVE AS (as opposed to "Save") and name it with an appropriate filename (*.jpg). Repeat as necessary for the remaining photos.

Thanks. But you would expect the software supplied with a £300 multifunction machine to separate the images from the film strip, wouldn't you? I'm still waiting on a reply from hp; pathetic customer support, I can tell you! But at least they aren't getting a penny out of me for inks!

But you would expect the software supplied with a £300 multifunction machine to separate the images from the film strip, wouldn't you?

Well, it IS a multifunction machine and you get what you pay for. The printer, as you stated, maintains "excellent print quality." However, the scanner and the software that controls that function sounds lacking. Just as an example, you may have paid £250 for a GREAT printer and £50 for a not-so-great scanner.

In 2003 I bought a Nikon Coolscan 400ED slide/negative scanner. The cost of the Nikon was exactly TWICE ($1,200 USD) what you paid for your multifunction HP unit. The Nikon's sole job was to scan. But scan it did... and it scanned very well. The Nikon 400ED made an excellent job of scanning my slides and negatives. The software made separate image files of each frame on a film strip -- all automatically and without user intervention.

I only mention my previous experience as an example. You may or may not be expecting too much from your scanner.

Have you tried looking for alternative / compatible scanner software to control it? VueScan works with many flatbed scanners (click here for HP) and may do what you want it to do. It is the same software I used with the Nikon.

Conclusion to this tale :

I finally managed to get through to HP's customer service people in Cape Town (from the UK). After logging the problem with a barely-literate Indian there, I called back the next day and was lucky enough to speak to a whitey who confirmed UK users had been sent a bad batch of drivers on the CDs accompanying their scanner purchases. Bloody idiots ... wrote a bunch of drivers to CDs without checking for flaws.

Anyway, he advised me to take the drivers off their website which took 2 hours via ADSL (200 MB). The software now works properly and lets me select the negative images individually by moving a box over the strip. Moral of the story: go straight to the company website and download if the software on disk is in any way suspect.