Product Reviews

Until a few months ago, the choice of which type of interface to go for when buying a scanner was easy. If you wanted a low-end device for home use or light office duties, it was USB; if you wanted a serious professional scanner, it was SCSI.

Then Umax launched the professional-quality PowerLook 1100 - the first FireWire flatbed scanner. Now it has introduced the first consumer FireWire scanner, the Astra 6400. The 6400 has a similar specification to the 3450 we reviewed (see Reviews, Vol 16 No 17, p31). Like the 3400 series, there are two options: you can have it with or without a transparency adaptor, the price difference being £50.

A noticeably bigger and heftier beast than the 3400, the 6400 measures 471mm x 312mm x 110mm and weighs 3.75kg without the tranny adaptor. It comes with the necessary power adaptor and FireWire cable and, in common with most FireWire devices, is a cinch to set up.

Its specifications make impressive reading: an optical resolution of 600 x 1200 pixels, which can be interpolated to 9600 x 9600, 42-bit colour density and a maximum scan size of 210mm x 290mm. Of course, none of this matters a jot if the device fails to perform in practice, but the Astra 6400 doesn't disappoint.

It's set up to cater for a wide range of users. For complete novices, or anyone who just wants a quick and easy way to scan an image or document, there are three buttons on the front of the scanner. These are used to scan an image to a specified application, directly to a printer, or to scan and send the result as an email attachment.

This single-button mode uses a technology Umax calls the Intelligent Image Process Engine (IIPE), which automatically detects whether a document or photo should be scanned in colour, grey scale or black and white. It also determines the optimal resolution, crops the image area automatically and rotates the image to the correct orientation if it's not straight on the scanner bed. The only variable you need to configure is which

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application an image is scanned into. This worked pretty well in practice, although the de-skewing feature didn't appear to do anything.

It's just as well that the 6400 is easy to set up and use, because the documentation provided is pretty poor. There is a PDF manual on the CD, but it's not easy to find and the hard copy documentation is limited to a poorly printed Quick Start guide.

For more sophisticated use, the Astra uses VistaScan 3.7 as its driver. VistaScan is set up to provide beginners with as much assistance as possible, while also allowing more advanced users access to the under-the-hood pre-scan refinements. In Beginner mode, all the user needs to do is tell the driver whether the media to be scanned is a photo, a printed page, a text document or line art, and VistaScan does the rest. The Advanced function allows complete manual control over resolution, enlargement and de-screening. It also enables fine-tuning of brightness, contrast, shadow, midtone and highlight, and alteration of curves.

We were very impressed with the results from the Astra 6400. It picked out fine detail well and was faithful in its reproduction of colour. As you'd expect from a FireWire device, it was pretty nippy, too. An A4 image scanned at 300dpi took 30.87 seconds on the 6400, compared with 47 seconds on its USB counterpart, the 3400. Scanning transparencies at 1200dpi with the optional transparency adaptor showed even bigger improvements, with a 70% reduction in the time taken to scan four 35mm slides at once. We should point out that the results of scanning transparencies on the 6400 were disappointing and it's debatable whether it's worth paying £50 for this ability.

Included in the software bundle with the 6400 are the excellent Adobe PhotoDeluxe 2.0, a cut-down version of Caere's OmniPage and Presto! PageManager. OmniPage is a reasonable OCR package which makes a decent attempt at recognising text. You can choose to scan a document into, say, Microsoft Word or AppleWorks for this purpose. PageManager is a one-stop application for scanning and managing images and documents. It may be useful to some, but we found it clunky and unfriendly.

Overall, the Astra 6400 is an excellent scanner. It brings the option of FireWire into the consumer arena for the first time and produced some great results in our tests. However, the only real difference between this and the 3400 is FireWire, and this serves only to speed up the scanning process. If speed is important to you then you'll be delighted with the 6400. If not, you could save a few quid and plump for the 3400.