Product Reviews

The last Microtek scanner we reviewed was bulky, slow and came with terrible scanning software. Its image quality was excellent, though, and the £75 price tag was the same as you'd pay for the superb bundled image editor on its own. The 4600 doubles the optical resolution, but the main effect this seems to have

ADVERTISEMENT

is on the price.

The front panel sports the (now standard) shortcut buttons, but the automated procedure fails to crop documents to size, limiting its usefulness. However, closing the Microtek utility in the System Tray and hitting a button confused the scanner enough to give a choice of applications and open the TWAIN software - a handy (if accidental) feature.

The disastrous 'advanced TWAIN' software has been dropped, and the basic panel finally has some visual feedback about its settings without clicking on each button individually. The layout still isn't ideal, though. At least the marvellous PhotoImpact 5 is included for all your image editing needs.

Scans were painfully slow, but the results were pretty good, with excellent contrast and good colours. However, despite the high optical resolution, images stopped being sharp at 600dpi, with 2,400dpi text distinctly blurred.