Until I got my new PC I had never even used a scanner, but I managed to get a cheap printer and scanner combo from Argos for £100 (Lexamrk Z12 and this scanner).
So, splitting it down the middle this scanner cost me a whopping £50. You can get other scanners for that price, but I have seen this one on sale singly for £70-£80 so I got a pretty good deal on it!
Of course, paying so little for it, I never expected to get a particularly amazing machine, and although I have absolutely nothing to compare it to it does seem to produce very good results.
Setting up the scanner is a simple task. It can only be connected via a USB lead, which is provided. You plug it in, remembering to unlock it, and switch on your PC. When prompted you install the drivers from the CD, then install the rest of the scanner software. The scanning software itself is not bad, but the bundled editing programs are some of the worst pieces of programming I have ever seen, but more on that later.
The scanner itself has no controls, everything is controlled from the PC. It does look alright though, having a more curved appearance than some of the other budget scanners you see. It's also fairly small and a lot less chunky than many other scanners I have seen. The lid is quite flimsy, although this seems to be par for the course for a scanner now-a-days. It's one 'feature' is that it comes with interchangeable handles, in 3 colours. It's pretty much the same as you change your mobile phone cover, although with a scanner you have to ask as to what the point is. It seems pretty stupid really, as it's such a small portion of the whole device that it doesn't change the look that much. Anyway, it's a novelty for all of about 30 seconds, but it does give it a unique feature.
So, when you want to scan something you simply put in the paper you want to scan and fire up the software. What it does next is take a quick preview so you can see what's in the scanner, then presents you with options as to what you do next.
First you choose the type of object you're scanning, be it a matt photo, newsprint or a magazine page. Then you choose where you want the output to go, such as in an email, a web image, a file or a new document in the bundled image editing software. You can choose a few other options to do with colour and contrast, but that?s about it. It's all just a little too simple, you could use some more control. The program thinks it knows best, and tries to scan at a relevant dpi value going by what your scanning and where it's going to end up. You can wrestle to it to change the dpi, but it often sneaks back to what it wants without telling you. It would be nice to get more information, and a bit more control.
That of course is the standalone mode, you can also use the scanner as a TWAIN device, or as 7an OLE object. TWAIN (I think) is a protocol that lets other programs use your scanner, so you can straight in to a program without using that software. OLE mode is were you insert an object in a program like Word. The problem is that both of these 'modes' take you to the Agfa software en-route.
The OCR is done by a program called READ IRIS, which does a good job. If you have a plain page of A4 printed text then it will mostly produce 100% perfect documents, but obviously the less clear the writing and worse the paper the less accurate the OCR is.
The bundled software has to be a joke. Someone?s sick joke. Ok, sorry, I'm being nasty again. There are some good points to Corel's 'Print Office' and 'Photo House', just not many! I mean to start with, why are there two programs. One of them edits your photo's, the other prints them - surely they could be combined in to one program? Secondly they run awfully. With both of these programs open the PC slows to a crawl. And then comes the obligatory crash. You see, if you open picture bigger than about one megabyte these programs don't like it. Yes, I only have 64Mb RAM (but there is 128Mb more on the way) but this is well above the minimum system requirements. I can forgive it for crashing when I try to edit a 100Mb bit map image, but an 800K jpeg - it's not on. Editing is slow, and the few effects you do take an age to complete. There are plenty of fun effects to add swirls and funny bits to your pictures, but it is left wanting as a serious editor. The only answer is to scan to a file then use a different program.
And just incase you didn't have a clue how to use any of this stuff you would expect a printed manual to help you out. Wouldn't you? Every other piece of hardware I ever bought came with too many manuals - this goes the opposite way, it's documentation boils down to one badly constructed poster. It does have some information on, but it's A2 size for god's sake - you need a whole carpet to look at it and a compass to navigate to the bit you want. The owners guide comes instead in an Adobe Acrobat document.
At least the machine is good. It scans up to 600ppi x 12000ppi, which through interpolation rises up to 9600ppi x 9600ppi. More importantly images are sharp and basically a perfect copy of whatever you shove in!
Spec wise you need a Pentium with 32Mb of RAM, the only problem may be that you need a USB port, which some older PC's don't have. And you can use it on a Macintosh, but not Linux. I actually sent an email to them asking about Linux support, and I did get a reply, but it basically said no.
Good hardware wise, but the software could be better.
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