By Cheryl Currid

If you've had your sights set on scanning that shoe box full of old slides, 35 mm negatives and stacks of photos, there's hope from Hewlett-Packard.

The company has just introduced a line of scanners that will bring your old analog pictures into the digital world.

The $199 HP ScanJet 4570c digital scanner gives you a flatbed scanner and an attachment that can scan up to four 35 mm negatives or slides at one time. The scanner adjusts to scan from 21 dots per inch up to 2,400 dpi and 48-bit color. It yields photo-quality results, even when scanning small negatives and then printing them to a large picture.

If you have several shoe boxes of photos, you'll probably want to spend $100 more to get the HP ScanJet 5500 digital scanner, which comes with a photo feeder. With the feeder, you can set it up with a stack of photos (3-by-5 and 4-by-6 inch photos only) and let it do all the work.

I was pleased to see how quickly it could scan photos when I tested the ScanJet 5500. When I scanned slides and negatives, things took a little longer because it was scanning those small images at a much higher resolution. Still, this offers an easy method of digitizing pictures that have been stacking up for years, all at less than half the price of a digital film scanner.

With both scanners, HP includes software called the HP Director. It lets you customize your scanner for the media you are using. It also comes with two handy utilities, Share to the Web and Memories Disc Creator.

The Web sharing utility is simple to set up and lets you save your photos to commercial sites such as CardStore.com, Ofoto.com, MyFamily.com, NetDocuments or HP's own HPPhoto.com Web site. The software even creates a shortcut on your desktop to make it easy to share. All you need to do is set up your free online account at HPPhoto.com and then drag the photos you want to share onto the shortcut.

Pictures saved to the HP Photo site can be arranged into albums or sent out as e-mails. You can even order professionally printed photos from the Web, although HP would probably be happier if you printed them at home on an HP printer.

The HP Memories Disc Creator gives you a simple solution for saving and sharing your images on CDs or DVDs. The software enables you to create a personalized photo show with a title page, music and an album of all your images to view or browse. The software can automatically print single photos, index sheets and even a jewel case insert directly from your printer.

You can view a Memories Disc from any PC, or even on a TV with a compatible DVD player. Just make sure that the DVD supports Video CD playback, and your CD-R or CD-RW Memories Discs will be a breeze to create and distribute.

For example, imagine creating a photo show that details the progress of a construction project, landscaping job or anything else that pictures convey better than words.

Both scanners are great examples of products that encourage creative home and office projects, and provide stunning results. And, with HP's software, working with pictures is easy and fun.