Product Reviews

The Umax Astra 3450 is more than just the latest in a long line of small, low-cost USB scanners to come to market. It stands out from the crowd by offering a transparency adaptor as standard, enabling consumers to scan reflective, transparent, and negative originals on one device.

Like most USB scanners these days, the 3450 is significantly smaller than its SCSI siblings of a couple of years ago. Measuring a slight 435mm x 290mm x 65mm, it won't hog room on your desk. This provides enough room under the hood to scan reflectives up to A4 size, but the maximum for transparencies is a significantly smaller 125mm x 100mm (5in x 4in).

The maximum optical resolution in both modes is 600 x 1200 pixels, which is fine for most of the uses to which this scanner will be put. However, it does limit the degree to which negatives and 35mm transparencies can be enlarged without degradation. If you work mostly with negatives and transparencies, you may be better off considering a low-end dedicated transparency scanner such as the Jessops PrimeFilm 1800u (Vol 16 No 7, p29). The maximum colour depth of the 3450 is 42-bit, which is higher than most consumer scanners and probably overkill for its

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intended market.

One of the most useful features of the 3450 is the single-button operation, accessed from the buttons on the front of the device, which enables you to scan images and documents into your normal image editor, directly to a printer or to an email attachment at the touch of a button. This works very well in practice, and scanning to a printer in particular is very convenient.

Of course, operating this way sacrifices control over precisely how an image is scanned. For a more controlled approach, Umax supplies Adobe PhotoDeluxe 2.0, or you can use any image editor which supports Photoshop plug-ins. The VistaScan driver enables you to select automatic mode, or expert mode. the latter offers a reasonably high level of control over things like brightness, contrast, saturation and levels adjustment.

Umax has also bundled PrestoPage Manager and a cut-down version of ScanSoft's OmniPage OCR software. PageManager, despite being revised since we last saw it, feels outdated and clunky. Its aim is to be a one-stop-shop for previewing images and printing, emailing, faxing or passing them onto the appropriate application for editing. But its analogy of a desktop with an in-tray just doesn't work.

The results from the 3450 were pretty good. Reflective scans produced good vibrant images with lots of detail and faithful colour reproduction. Transparencies and negatives fared less well and suffered from grainy images. Again, the PrimeFilm 1800u is a better bet for transparencies.

Despite its shortcomings as a transparency scanner, the Astra 3450 is an excellent consumer device, and it's fine if you only scan transparencies occasionally. In particular, if you want a scanner for scanning different types of media for the Web, it'll serve you well.