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I Think I Scan
Washington Post Staff Writer March 27, 1998; Page N44 While most other computing components are getting smaller and taking up less space, scanner manufacturers have apparently decided that bigger is better. The slim, sheetfed scanners that lined store shelves a year ago are suddenly getting harder to find and have been largely replaced by flatbeds that cost less and include more powerful features, but take up about four times as much space on your desk. The space tradeoff was probably inevitable as scanners make the transformation from home copier and fax machines to desk-bound Fotomats. And while sheetfed scanners work well with individual photos, they generally flunk when it comes to scanning pages out of books and magazines; at best, they offer detachable hand-scan modes, a method that requires the patience and steady hands of a surgeon. So manufacturers seem to have done an about-face, turning away from sheetfed scanners and settling on a standard flatbed size of roughly 12 by 16 inches, with a scanning surface the size of a legal pad. While I'm still a fan of Visioneer's tiny and well-designed PaperPort Strobe sheetfed scanner, the latest generation of flatbeds offer some significant advantages that justify their assault on your desk space. First and foremost is image quality: When the image you're scanning is held in one place, it's obviously less likely to slip around or get misaligned. You don't have to anxiously watch your favorite photos be sucked into the maw of a sheetfed scanner, wondering whether they might be chewed up or scratched. You don't have to worry about ripping pages out of books or magazines just to get a decent image. Lay your image onto the glass, drop the lid (or remove it) and scan away. And, notwithstanding some claims of marketing executives that sheetfeds scan faster than flatbeds, all the scanners we tested ran a little faster than the Strobe. We tested four flatbeds, all retailing for $150 or less. Three, Visioneer's PaperPort 6000 and PaperPort 3100 and Umax's Astra 610P, were surprisingly uniform in both speed and quality, each with only slight advantages over the others; the fourth, Microtek's highly touted ScanMaker V310, was DOA, the victim of a possible driver problem.
THE BASICS Visioneer remains the scanner manufacturer to beat, if only by virtue of its smartly designed, versatile PaperPort image management software, available separately in an $80 deluxe version for use with other scanners. Simply scan an image, then drag and drop it to your printer or favorite editing software. Or edit the image in PaperPort itself. Competitors have tried and failed fairly miserably in their attempts to duplicate this.
THE PICTURES Note that all of these figures are for what's called 'optical resolution'; most scanners can deliver significantly higher resolution through 'software interpolation', an electronic form of reading between the lines, in which a scanner's software extrapolates details from what its hardware can detect. Scanner manufacturers and computer salespeople make a lot of noise about resolution, but they rarely talk about the downside of high-resolution scanning. Unless you're working with a Cray supercomputer, you generally won't want to scan images at a setting much higher than 600 dpi for most everyday applications. Scanning a 4-by-6-inch picture at a software-interpolated 2400 dpi took at least 10 minutes on each of our test scanners and ate up about 15 megabytes of disk space. Basic editing for those images on our 150 MHz Pentium test computer was as joyful as jogging through Super Glue. Unless you're making archival copies of photos, don't fixate on resolution claims.
THE BUGS The big disappointment of this review was the 30-bit ScanMaker V310 by Microtek, a company that boasts it has won more awards and has a history of more scanning innovations than anyone else in the desktop scanning industry. Not that we'd know. Our test model's scanning element suffered seizures every time it was asked to read a document. After calling Microtek's long-distance customer service line, and waiting on hold for 30 minutes, the technician who took my call angrily lectured me for not being at my computer when he finally answered. Sorry for having a life, guy! I jotted down the only troubleshooting tip he was willing to give me. When that failed, I did what I would've done if I had bought the ScanMaker at a store. I packed it up for a quick return.
PaperPort 3100, Visioneer;
PaperPort 6000, Visioneer;
Astra 610P, Umax;
ScanMaker V310, Microtek;
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company |
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