Product Reviews

The price of A3 scanners has gone into a tailspin, and Microtek has now introduced the 9600XL, a 36-bit A3 scanner aimed at professional designers, for £2000.

The 9600XL has an optical resolution of 600dpi x 1200dpi or an interpolated resolution of 9600dpi x 9600dpi. The optical resolution is lower than virtually all other A3 scanners on the market. However, most other A3 scanners cost more than twice as much, and the interpolated resolution of 9600dpi is comparatively high.

The 9600XL will scan images up to a maximum of 12in x 17in. At high resolutions, an A3 image is too large for most users to work with, but does provide a means to get clear scaled-down images from an original. Also, the size of the scanning bed means it can accommodate over-sized materials like newspapers and tabloid magazines. The bed will house up to 10 3.5in x 5in photographs at one time, and you can set up batch scans which save a considerable amount of time. There is also an optional transparent media adaptor.

The 36-bit colour depth provides 12 bits per RGB channel. This means the 9600 is capable of capturing a huge range of colours, which makes it ideal for scanning continuous tone images as it can cope with the subtleties of colour gradation.

Although nearly all work in image editing software requires conversion to 24-bit, the greater 36-bit depth of the scan provides better tonal ranges and gradients than would be possible if the original scan was 24-bit. However, there is a price to pay for this greater dynamic colour range - scanning in 36-bit colour results in huge file sizes.

In our tests, the quality of the scans was good, but not good enough for work requiring very high quality images, and there were noticeable halos on some images. Colour fidelity was acceptable, even when no colour correction was used.

With dimensions of 620mm x 376mm x 130mm, the scanner's overall size is not much greater than the A3 bed itself, which is a bonus if desk space is at a premium. Another plus is the

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case which, like Microtek's other recently released scanners, is made of stainless steel. Unusually for an A3 scanner, it is hinged along the short end, making it look more like an over-sized A4 scanner than a standard A3 device.

The Microtek 9600XL will appeal to anyone on a limited budget who needs to scan A3 images or documents. The only other products in the same price range are the similarly specified Epson GT-12000 (Reviews, Vol 12, No 25, p69) and another new Microtek product, the ScanMaker 6400XL. The latter differs from the 9600XL in that it has an optical resolution of 400dpi x 800dpi, which can be interpolated to 6400dpi x 6400dpi, and it costs £1199.

Undoubtedly, compromises have to be made to provide an A3 scanner for less than £2000, and Microtek has made them in the software and documentation.

The supplied ScanWizard plug-in didn't perform well in our tests, and failed to recognise the unit on several occasions. We tested the scanner with a Power Mac 9500/150; it was the only device connected to the external SCSI bus and we still had problems getting it to work. ScanWizard acts like SCSI Probe, listing any supported devices with their ID numbers. It picked up the scanner in the list but wouldn't allow it to be used. After restarting a number of times and changing the ID number from its default, we eventually got it to work.

When it works, ScanWizard provides several colour correction and enhancement options. Among these are an Advanced Image Enhancer, which allows the user to see the effects of any correctional changes and compare them with the original preview scan. It also supports batch scanning and has a descreening option. The batch scanning feature is particularly useful as it allows several photographs to be placed on the scan bed and then customises settings for each one before they're all scanned. Custom settings can be saved for later use.

Adobe has recently removed Photoshop from the software bundles provided with scanners, forcing vendors to look for alternatives. Microtek has chosen ColorIT!, MetaCreations' Painter 5.0 and Caere's OmniPage OCR software for the 9600XL.

The hard copy documentation provided was unbelievably thin, consisting of just a two-page installation guide. Users paying out so much money really deserve better than this.

A3 flatbed scanners were beyond the reach of most until recently, but as the A3 print market grows, they're becoming ever more affordable. The 9600XL provides a cost-effective solution to large format scanning, but is unfortunately let down by the software and manuals supplied.