Product Reviews

We're not always impressed to see a scanner supplied with a transparency frame for slides and negatives, because many flatbeds just aren't up to the job. These media are much smaller than typical prints, so capturing them effectively requires higher resolution and accuracy. The V200 certainly has the former, with an optical resolution of up to 4800x9600dpi - enough to blow up a 35mm frame to large sizes.

The simple, powerful interface makes it easy to scan up to six negs at once. Each frame is shown as a thumbnail which you can preview and scan individually. A range of resolution, tone and image correction tools let you tweak the output

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The V200 uses CCD imaging hardware. A cold cathode light source illuminates what you're scanning, and lenses and mirrors split and direct the light onto the optical sensors that turn it into data. Because of the power needed by the lamp, the scanner uses a mains adaptor rather than being powered from the USB port. The benefit is that it produced more accurate colour than any USB-powered scanner we've seen.

The maximum 48-bit colour depth allows you to store billions of colours, but scans take longer and the resulting files are larger. There's no advantage unless you're involved in high-end colour-critical work, in which case you'd be using a different scanner. The default 24-bit is fine for most tasks.

Image quality was excellent, with bright, faithful reproduction of colour and shading on both photo and transparency scans. Fine details in our photos were reproduced crisply, as were the smallest 5pt fonts in our 300dpi document scans.

The V200 comes with basic image editing and management software as well as ABBYY FineReader6, which did a fairly accurate job of converting scanned documents into text files.

At under £60, the V200 is an excellent home scanner for photos and documents alike.