UMAX Astra 5400

...I bought. I purchased a Umax Astra 5400 scanner. The first thing that struck me when it was delivered was the sheer size of it. I know most flat bed scanners are quite a good size but this one seemed quite a bit bigger measuring 16 ½ inches by 12 ¼ inches. This as you can imagine takes up a goodly proportion of my desk. It was light and dark grey in colour with four buttons on the front. One is to turn off the lamp for saving the power; one is for ...
...the Umax Astra 5400 scanner is big and bulky, sloooow and doesn’t work very well. Would I buy another? No. Would I recommend it to anyone? No.

Thank you for reading I hope this is of use to you.



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A while ago as part of my pc bundle I bought. I purchased a Umax Astra 5400 scanner. The first thing that struck me when it was delivered was the sheer size of it. I know most flat bed scanners are quite a good size but this one seemed quite a bit bigger measuring 16 ½ inches by 12 ¼ inches. This as you can imagine takes up a goodly proportion of my desk. It was light and dark grey in colour with four buttons on the front. One is to turn off the lamp for saving the power; one is for scanning straight to email, one for scanning to documents and the other is just to scan to file.

When I started to assemble it and connect it to my pc. I found that the connector that connects the electricity supply was a little loose and when I choose to move my scanner a little it often falls out. It may not be that bigger deal to simply plug it back in but at first, until I had gotten use to it. I often thought there was a problem and would often check everything else first. In the package with my scanner were the driver, the user manual and a copy of the Adobe Photoshop 5.0.

I found the driver a nightmare to install. It comes with several features Adobe Acrobat. This is supposed to help with the reading of the program. Vista Shuttle. With this you can scan in a photo or some kind of an image and send it directly to make either a greetings card, e card, calendar, poster, wallpaper or screensaver. There is also something called Presto Page Manager. I am unable to tell you about this as it has never worked since the day I bought it, although I have installed and uninstalled a few times in order to try to activate it but it just wont have it.

The so-called manual is called a quick start guide. If you saw the amount of info inside you would understand why. It is very small and there are 15 pages to it and includes the installation of the Photoshop soft ware. All the instructions are written in three different languages. The writing is very small as are the illustrations. To be honest I found the booklet totally useless.

When I first tried to install the program a information window came up telling me that it had a conflict with my wheel mouse that it found running. It advised me to call up my task manager and end my mouse program then point and click ok. What it didn’t try to advise was if I turned off my mouse, just how would I be able to point at ok or anything else come to that. I just ignored it and carried on with the installation’s did eventually manage to get it installed.

The first time I went to use it. I wanted to scan something straight to my printer so I clicked on the icon for the scanner in my systems tray and this brought up the interface. This looked quite simple to understand. It had a one-click preview setting which I found useful and there is a setting for beginners which I chose. I did my preview then clicked to send it to my printer. Nothing happened after a while I phone their help line which was just as useless. They apparently could not help. While I was trying to sort it out with them I clicked on scan to file and it worked. I then tried scan to printer and that then worked. Every time I had needed to reinstall the software I have to go thought the same routine of first scanning to file before it will allow me to scan to my printer. The help line could not explain this.

The help line although very nice and polite is in fact quite useless. I have phoned them a couple of times only to have them as baffled as myself. I then went on to find the problem myself. The only thing they did give me advice on, although it took three of them to work the problem out was. When I went to defragment my hard drive I could not start the defragmenter after some investigation I found this was some kind of a conflict between Windows and my scanner. It seems that whenever I want to defragment I first have to remove the scanner icon from my system tray. Don’t ask!.

The images that the scanner produces are not of a too bad quality. The background is pale blue instead of white though and there is often banding. The colours are not as true as they should be but the picture itself is nice and clear. On the web site, which is as long winded as the programs, they do have a up dater which is meant to take care of all these problems. Although it helps it doesn’t cure the problem. I would also like to add that it is very slooooow to do the scanning to anything.

Another bad point is. You cannot crop your image to suit your needs. The whole image is cased in the pale blue background so if you wanted to insert your image into a document, you would need to send it to some kind of workshop program first.

All in all the Umax Astra 5400 scanner is big and bulky, sloooow and doesn’t work very well. Would I buy another? No. Would I recommend it to anyone? No.

Thank you for reading I hope this is of use to you.

 

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