Hardware Review
UMAX Astra 1200S Scanner
by Merle Nicholson, President, Tampa PC Users Group
Well, I just had to buy a scanner after many years of price checking. You may have noticed that the prices, while going down steadily, took a nosedive just before Christmas. This one, a 600x1200 dpi model was priced at $249, and the model 610 at 300x600 dpi was priced at $119 and for a day or so, had a rebate bringing it down to $99. But I took at look at the 600x1200 for $250 and didn’t give the other a second thought. I should maybe have given it a second thought, but more on this later.
As for the hardware, it’s a scanner. What more can I say except that it is SCSI, and it has a lid, being a 8 1/2 x 14 flatbed, and it scans. The proof is in the software!
The attraction that it had over the 610 was the SCSI interface card. I really didn’t want to add another parallel cable to an already tight, crowded mess of cables, and was also reluctant because of stories of printing issues and operating with the LS120 or ZIP drive I was planning to put there too. So - unless you already have SCSI installed - you have to open your computer and install the 8-bit card in an ISA slot. Windows 95 does not recognize the card at all. There are no settings on the card or in software. It just does not exist as far as the operating system is concerned, but it works. The techie part of me hates that, but what the hey. The installation instructions are very clear and easy for anyone to follow. That’s the hardware part of the review.
When it comes to scanners, software is probably more important than hardware, and this one really is not bad. The biggest complaint that I have is with the documentation. There’s nothing I can find that gives a really clear picture of the overall functions of the software and how they fit together. I have it mostly figured out, but not all. There are two good manuals in Acrobat format, one on the main program called Presto PageManager and one on the TWAIN device called VistaScan. PageManager is the central program, and I’ll start there after I cover the three utility programs: Copier, AutoScan Setup and Scanner Test.
Copier is just wonderful. You just start Copier, put a document in the scanner, select the number of copies, and hit the start button. It’s like a real copier, except slower. In 30 seconds the printer starts, so on my old Deskjet it’s a full two minutes from start to finish, but, to be fair, the printer time is ¾ of that and you can be scanning more while the printer prints. Copier’s control panel has several controls like reduction from 1% to 200% and other controls making it more versatile than a standard Xerographic copier. Copier is a nice bonus as far as I’m concerned; not having expected it. I find I use it a lot, and my family does too. And don’t forget that your FAX, if you have a FAX modem, is a printer device too, making it easy to FAX out anything on paper.
The other two utilities, Autoscan Setup and Scanner are for setup and testing. They do a good job, but you don’t use them unless you have trouble with the interface. I did not.
Now to PageManager. It’s a kind of a "shell" to use a software term, a kind of a manager for all the scanning you may want to do. You don’t have to use it all the time (except for OCR), but it’s a neat concept, and after I figured out what it did, I use it all the time except for copying.
First let’s review a scanner term - TWAIN. It’s a standardized interfacing system that allows many different software applications to access one or more input devices. In our case just one: a scanner. You may have noticed in Paintshop Pro a menu item called "Acquire". All graphics programs will have it. (I was surprised that Microsoft PowerPoint doesn’t, that I could find.) The menu item Acquire in such a program will start up the registered TWAIN-compliant device - in our case, a program called VistaScan. With VistaScan, you do the actual scanning, and then when done, VistaScan "hands" the result to the program!
Now back to PageManager. PageManager uses the Acquire in its tool menu to get more scanned documents or pictures and stacks them up as small thumbnail pictures side by side. So you can manage all the scanned images you have from here. Delete them as needed or pass them onto other programs. PageManager has an application toolbar at its bottom to designate all the apps that you may want to pass images onto. The bar is customizable, but the basic list contains e-mail, FAX, Print, PageType, PageImage and Notepad. I removed Notepad and replaced it with Microsoft Word, and then added Paintshop Pro and PhotoDeluxe. So after scanning in the image and after it appears as a thumbnail picture, you simply drag the thumbnail image to the Application button of your choice. Now, associated with each application program is a selection of image type. The image types are Bitmapped (.BMP), PCX (.PCX), TIFF (.TIF) and ASCII Text. In the case of MS Word (and notepad before I deleted it), I selected ASCII text. So guess what happens when you drag an image to Word? It does OCR on the image! (OCR=Optical Character Recognition). Converts it to text. And I must say it’s fast and fairly accurate, too. Now that’s a subjective opinion, of course. I really didn’t do testing of its accuracy. And its having OCR was the reason I put MS Word on the App bar. Notepad doesn’t have a spell checker. And all OCR needs a spell checker to find the words it messes up, and this OCR just doesn’t have it. I’m sure I’d be happier with one of several good OCR software programs; I’ve used them and like them, but …. this one comes with the package and I didn’t spend the extra $80 or so. I’ll stick with this until I have some large difficult OCR’ing to do.
Two other apps are supplied, PageImage for image editing and PageType for forms conversion. I’ll have to skip over PageType. The help for it is abysmal, consisting of a definition of each menu item. PageImage’s help is the same, but at least I know what an image editor does, and the functions are strikingly similar to Paintshop Pro, the popular shareware program, so I was comfortable with it. But I’ve decided that PaintShop Pro has more functions, so I’ve stopped using PageImage, and I’ll probably delete it from my system. But in fairness, PageImage isn’t bad, and isn’t hard to use, and for basic cropping, resizing, color adjustments and such and if the limited output formats (.JPG, .PCD, .PCX, .TGA and .TIF) are adequate (where’s .GIF?), then it’ll work well.
Neither PaintShop Pro nor PageImage is good for photo editing, and they weren’t really designed for it. For detailed photo editing, I used Adobe PhotoDeluxe. I won it as a doorprize long ago and didn’t take it out of the box until I got the scanner. I clipped the background out of a photo and then pasted in a graduated blue background for my personal website. Nice.
When "Acquiring" images into any application, the VistaScan software is as easy to use as any I’ve seen, and it is better than the software that comes with the Hewlett-Packard scanners I am familiar with. It gives a range of adjustments and histograms that would take some study to be able to use them effectively, but that’s true of Paintshop Pro, too. Fortunately, you can take the defaults and do very well. Some obvious functions are for contrast and brightness that you may want to use most of the time, and, at the worst, you just keep scanning and adjusting until you get what you want.
Now to the problems and overall observations. I really didn’t have any problems except in my own expectations. I discovered that to use what I paid for (not much money at that) I need more … memory, hard drive and printer. On a scanner that I paid extra money for to get 600x1200 dpi, guess what? … I’m scanning at 300 dpi. Why? My 32MB of system memory isn’t enough for really high resolutions scans. I can do a standard photo at 1200x1200 and then if I close all other apps down I can edit it. And the hard drive space! It apparently uses a lot of temporary disk space, so I had to uninstall it and reinstall on another drive where I had more room. But the detail! Zoom in! Wow! A lot of detail. It looks like nothing on the photo is lost!
I never thought that I’d see an "out of memory" error on my system, but I had it within 10 minutes of installing the scanner. Am I really disappointed? No. 300dpi is quite enough for most purposes, and I really didn’t know that. So, could I have bought the 300x600 and saved $100? Yes, but I wouldn’t have gotten the SCSI interface with that model as far as I could tell. I’m still happy with it, and I can always add another 32MB of RAM, can’t I? But it’ll have to wait for a new photo-quality printer.
UMAX Technologies Inc., 3561 Gateway Blvd. , Fremont CA 94538, (510) 651-4000
About $250 is the street price. u