The SnapScan 1212P is a color flatbed scanner for the PC from Agfa. This one-pass scanner is a good choice for school, home office and small business use. Scan text pages, artwork... more
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A review by cjkace on Agfa SnapScan 1212p March 27th, 2001
Author's product rating:
Speed
Fast
Colour sensitivity
Excellent
Resolution
Excellent
Ease of Installation
Excellent - very quick and easy
Value For Money
Excellent
Advantages:
Affordable, fast scans, good quality, crisp colours, easy installation, choice of drivers
Disadvantages:
Advanced driver can be overwhelming, parallel port connection
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
This scanner is one of the best investments in my computer that I have ever made. I've seen too many cheap scanners that produce very poor scans ( Mustek being a notable manufacturer ), so I looked for a mid-range scanner price under £100 and eventually chose this one.
It's a parallel port flat bed scanner, so it plugs into the printer port on your PC. It has two ports on the rear of the scanner, one from the PC and the other connects a printer so you can still use your old printer even with the scanner plugged in ( although you can't use both at the same time). The scanner is much like a photo-copier in the you lift the lid, place your picture/document face down on the glass and set it scanning.
Installation was almost foolproof, with easy concise instructions. It tells you about setting the parallel port mode in the bios (it needs to be EPP/ECP), and then offers to either install the basic or advanced scanner drivers. Basic photo-editing aand optical character recognition software also comes with the scanner but I tend to use Paintshop Pro for my pictures and can't recall evr wanting to scan in a text document so I've never used the OCR software.
For everyday use and quick scans, the basic drivers are excellent. It asks what you are scanning from (photo, magazine, newspaper etc), asks what resolution you would like (DPI or dots per inch), then you preview the scan.
I put a 7 x 5 photo in, previewed and scanned in under 5 minutes at 600 DPI. I was stunned at the quality. I've seen scanners that supposedly offered twice the resolution and the scans came out all wishy-washy. These were crisp. The colours were excellent and well defined. The scanner is a little slow, due to the parallel port connection, but not as slow as some I've seen.
The advanced driver offers more features, but can be a pain to use. It does offer more, especially if you have a damaged or discoloured photo, but is probably too difficult to use for the novice user, although practice does bring it's own rewards.
Summing up, the AGFA Snapscan 1212P offers top-quality in this price range and as far as I am aware the only difference between the 1212P and the 1212U is the connection. Also don't be fooled by scanners offering incredible resolutions and colours as even for the most intensive uses 600dpi at 24bit is perfectly acceptable.
Advantages: Cheap, parallel port, fast and friendly service, good software included. Disadvantages: Erm, haven't found any yet, except the OCR (text editing) software was hard to setup properly.
The Agfa Snapscan 1212p is my first scanner and what an excellent choice I made! The p stands for parallel port, such as your printer port. For those of us who are not lucky enough to have USB connections as our computers are not exactly upto date enough for this sort of technology finding a cheap parallel port scanner has become increasingly difficult. As far as I can tell Argos now do not do a parallel port scanner and Office World has expensive ... ...one I chose was the Agfa Snapscan, refurbished Grade B scanner. Grade B means that it may be slightly damaged, such as a scratch or small mark. I cannot even see why it is a grade B as there is nothing wrong with it that I can see. I rang them up and spoke to a friendly member of staff who told me about the scanner and I got the address to send them a cheque. The delivery fee for my scanner was £10. I posted the cheque and within 2 days the scanner ...
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Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful
Advantages: so easy to use Disadvantages: my first one was broken on arrival
...would give good results. The AGFA scanner was recommended to me - it isn't too expensive (about thrity pounds, depending on whom you buy it from) it is easy to use, and it plugs in in such a way that you can run your printer at the same time.
Now, I've not had a scanner before, so I knew nothing about the possibility of having to unplug and plug it in, and do the same with the printer - I gather this is not unusual. For a person of little technical ... ...it, will certainly go abck to AGFA (although through some other middle man!) I woudl recomend this product for anyoen new to this sort of thing, and for anyone who doesn't want to do anything outrageously complucated. This scanner can handle any obvious scanning needs, and produces good quality images. ...
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Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful
Advantages: Cheap, adequate for email/web sites, maybe other applictaions as well Disadvantages: No driver available for Win2000
The 1212p (the 'p' stands for parallel port version) is getting quite and old piece of kit now and can therefore be picked up relatively cheaply ( try www.morgancomputers.co.uk for instance). But a bargain is only a bargain if it performs the tasks you require.
I purchased this scanner almost a year ago and have been using it to scan photos and articles to send via email and place on the web - this does not require a very high resolution and accurate ... ...it was a bonus that the 1212p has a resonably good resolution and produces accurate colour reproduction (at least on my monitor!). I have scanned photos in at digital-photo printing quality (300dpi) and it performs well at this resolution.
The quality of the scans are high, but the speed to produce them isn't amazing - my father has a canon scanner of a similar resolution and makes mine seem like a snail! The speed isn't too annoying if you only ...
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Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful
Advantages: Good price and good functionality Disadvantages: The scanner must be on when you boot up your computer if you've got Windows 95
All in all a very good scanner and a load of good sofware to go with it. Now when people say this scanner isn't fast, what are they comparing it to because it goes at a nice standard speed. Of course the speed at which a scanner scans something depends generally on two things: what you are scanning and at what resolution you are scanning it. If you don't understand the concept of picture resolution I'll quickly explain it now. The scanner will scan ... ...that are referred to when talking about resolution. The resolution you scan something is basically the number of these dots per inch (dpi) you want the scanner to scan. Therefore the higher the dpi of the thing you want to scan the longer the scanner will take to scan because it is having to scan the picture in more detail. As I've said the SNAPSCAN 1212 is just a standard scanner, but at a good competitive price. The benifits of this scanner include ...
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Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful
Advantages: Easy to use, easy to install and very good quality scanned pictures Disadvantages: Needs to be switched on before you boot up your computer or it may not function as it should
...Jungle.com and came across the Agfa snapscan 1212p flat bed scanner for the price of £81 and decided to get that one as it sounded good and had quite a bundle of software included in the price, such as page keeper, print house, a few others and ofcourse their installation software for the scanner (Scanwise). I am not sure if it still comes with the same software as it was almost a year ago that we got ours, so it may pay to check around if you are ... ...after making the order to Jungle the scanner came so we installed it soon after (you know whats its like new toy) which was very easy to do. Then came the fun, on using it I found it to scan relatively quickly and fairly quite. The scaned pictures can be scanned at your choice of resolution and to a destination of your choice, ie folders, emailed, optimized for web pages, sent to your printer to print image etc. The dimensions of the scanned image ...
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Voltage Required: AC 110/220 V ± 10% ( 50/60 Hz ), AC 110/220 V ± 20% ( 50/60 Hz ), AC 220 V ± 10% ( 50 Hz )
Power Consumption Operational ( Standby ): 25 Watt
Compliant Standards: EPA Energy Star
Manufacturer's product description
The SnapScan 1212P is a color flatbed scanner for the PC from Agfa. This one-pass scanner is a good choice for school, home office and small business use. Scan text pages, artwork or other documents up to 8.5x11.7 inches in size, and capture images in 36-bit color and in monochrome. The SnapScan 1212P supports 600 dpi resolution, 9600 dpi interpolated. This desktop scanner features a true enhanced parallel port (EPP) connection. It uses an internal SCSI command protocol and proprietary EPP chip to convert parallel signals into SCSI. This makes the scanner deliver faster data transfer for faster scans, and makes it easy to install and use. Agfa includes a software selection for image editing and OCR plus scanner tools and utilities. Agfa FotoSnap and FotoLook photo editing software, plus iPhoto Express determine professional-level settings for successful photo scans. Caere OmniPage LE OCR software reads text documents, magazines or books and converts text to save hours of retyping. Visioneer PaperPort software turns the SnapScan 1212P into a document management system for scanning, editing, filing, faxing and copying. Your modem becomes a fax machine and your printer is converted to a copy machine.
