£38 Scanner! Can`t complain! (Umax Astra 2100U)

Member Name: tigertom22

Product:	Umax Astra 2100U
Date:	10/01/02 (391 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap

Disadvantages: Not the best by any means!

But you won`t be singing its praises either!
Personally I won this scanner in an auction for £29 so I wasn’t going to feel like I’d been diddled too much anyway! But I’ve
got some mixed feelings about the scanner so I will list its plus points and then dissect it!


Plus points
~~~~~~~

Comes with all the instructions you could ever need, and its
not annoying to install. First time for me! All the software you
could ever want is on the disks that come with it. There is
the scanner drivers, a photo manager (!) and TEXT
recognition software (trial only) - Very nice!

The scanner has a very nice `light on / off` option you can
control from your computer and it always appears when you
close down the software.

Looks-wise it is very simple, but then its a scanner! In its
favour though is the fact that you can lift the top off the
scanner, which means you can scan even more weird and
wonderful things.

It is really very cheap! If you not looking for AMAZING quality
and instead just want a working scanner to muck about on
then this is for you!


The scanner is connected to your PC by the really lovely USB
cables! (love them)


Bad points
~~~~~~~

When you actually get down to using the scanner itself it is
VERY slow and mildly irritating to use. For example if you want
to scan an image, first you must (ALWAYS) wait 30 seconds
whilst the scanner warms up and then you must wait whilst it
scans and pray you choose the right dpi. Otherwise its a
re-scan.
Depending on the dpi you choose it can either take a long
time or ages!

The software is very annoying and unforgiving. I.e. if you
click something wrong it will go off and scan accidentally and
will not let you stop it till it`s finished. It has a pathetic
attempt to make it easy by splitting the options up into
Advanced and Beginner. But sadly most of the time you want
to use both, as ones over your head and the others to simple
- What’s wrong with just a list of images types, destination
option and dpi choice?

There is no Power off sw
itch on the scanner, so to really not
use up any power you must unplug it! (annoying)


Summary
~~~~~~

This is a good cheap scanner, you won’t be copying £10
notes with it, but for £38 from dabs your not going far wrong
either. Don’t bother with anything more expensive unless you
need the quality!
It does sometimes take ages to scan and can very annoying
to use. But the end results are as expected.
You scan stuff.

A good cheap buy!

Summary: