Scantastic! (Umax Astra 3400)

Name: The Duke

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Product:	Umax Astra 3400
Date:	28/03/01 (519 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, easy to use

Disadvantages: Short USB cable

The only previous experience I’ve had with scanners was with my sisters aging Black Widow parallel port scanner which recently went to the great image processor in the sky. As such, she was looking for a new scanner, and at the same time, my dad mentioned his interest in one as well, for some charity work he was doing. As I was the one with the Internet connection, I told them that I would sort them out.

After recent dealings with Scan, I decided to give them a go – looking on their web site showed lots of scanners, but one caught my eye – the Umax 3400 USB. It had recently been awarded a PC Format Gold Award, and was in the right price range for both my father, and my sister. After clearing the price with them, I ordered two.

After a shockingly short amount of time waiting (i.e. less than 24 hours from order to delivery) I had some new toys to play with… erm I mean, find out if they were in fully working order…

The Umax quick start guide, while helpful, is a little sloppily laid out for my liking – rather than each language having it’s own chapter, each step in the installation process is repeated in English, French and German. That’s not to say that it’s unhelpful, because it does explain everything you need to know to get your scanner up and running.

After installing the drivers, and additional software, and a reboot to bed the software in, I plugged the (rather short – about 1m) USB cable into my computer, and sure enough, Windows 98 SE recognised the device and completed the set-up. The software comes on three CD’s – one for drivers, one with Windows Adobe Photo Deluxe and a third for Mac Adobe Photo Deluxe 2.

So – what about scan quality? Even though I had installed Adobe Photo deluxe, I booted up Paint Shop Pro 6, as I’ve been using it for years, and thought that my familiarity with it would enable me to produce better scans. Howev
er, after successfully scanning in one photo, the system crashed as I attempted to scan a second. One quick reboot later, and I loaded Adobe Photo Deluxe.

After a few minutes of clicking on various items in the program (my way of learning the program – I’m a bloke, I don’t believe in instruction manuals!) I decided to take the plunge and start scanning. The software made this incredibly easy – you can do it two ways – using the scanner’s own software, or the inbuilt one in Adobe. As it was the scanners own software coupled with PSP6, I decided to give the Adobe one a try. It asks you some questions like what type of document it is, what size you want the output to be, what purpose it’s for etc. and then it goes and scans the document for you.

Maybe it’s just my shockingly bad eyesight, but while the scans were better than the ones previously done on the Black Widow, I could not find much of a difference in any of the scans done with Adobe or PSP6 no matter what tweaking I did on the image. The scans are good though, and the Adobe software has some excellent features for tidying up photographs with auto fixers (which are undo-able). One bit that did annoy me was that I had to ”export” my photo scans to JPEG instead of just using “Save As…” other wise you save your scans as one of Adobes own formats (interesting feature is saving scans as pdf files!)
The UMAX has four buttons on the front three of which are for supposedly quick scanning, but for the life of me, I can’t get these to work (Did someone say “instruction manual”?) but they supposedly do everything automatically once you press one of the buttons – scan, copy and custom. (The last is a power off feature for saving the scan head)

For those of you who have used parallel port scanners before, well, you’re in for a shock. The Umax (and I assume all USB scanners) are very fast
. In fact I had a scan done, and was image editing in the time it took the old BW to warm up! All this and better image quality to boot!

Its’ size is slightly larger than an A4 sheet, and at a rough guess, I would estimate maybe one third again on length and width for a rough desktop footprint guide. I wasn’t too impressed with the lid on one of the models which felt a bit flimsy and feels as if it might be easily breakable, but the other one seems solid enough.

All in all, the scanner is excellent – photos and low detail line drawings (which are all I’ve scanned so far) are excellent. It’s fast, easy to set up and very easy to use, especially if you use the Adobe software. It’s compatible with both PC’s and Macs with software supplied for both.

One final point - as it's a USB scanner, you really need at least Windows 98 to use this as Windows 95 doesn't support USB.

Summary: