Product Reviews

Microtek has announced a number of new scanners before the end of 2001, but the ScanMaker 4800 is definitely intended to be available in time for Christmas shopping. It's an affordable A4, USB-connected flatbed intended for home and business use. It's also easy to install and sports a very stylish design. Although it's not as cheap as many of the low-end scanners on the market, the ScanMaker 4800 justifies its price with superior quality results and ease of use.

As the product name suggests, the scanner's colour capture depth is specified at a maximum of 48-bit. The optical sampling rate is 1200ppi x 2400ppi, with a maximum interpolated resolution of 9600ppi.

As ever, though, these figures need to be seen in perspective: it's a consumer device with cheaper optics than your average 48-bit, 1200ppi prepress scanner. However, for its intended market, the ScanMaker 4800 has a lot going for it. It's compact, occupying a footprint of 435mm x 288mm and rising only 80mm from your desktop - a pretty good size for a genuine CCD-based (as opposed to CIS) scanner. What's more, its rubber feet and 2.7kg weight keep it from sliding around without making the device too heavy to move.

Case in point

The case design is in tune with the current 'platinum' fashion and the build quality feels rugged and substantial. Even the backlit, smart buttons at the front give a solid action when pressed, rather than the usual cheap, clicky feel on practically all other low-cost scanners.

These five iconised buttons provide a quick way to conduct common tasks: a quick scan, scan to printer, scan to email, OCR and scan to Web. Untypically, these functions work fairly well from the standard installation, requiring the minimum of additional setup. The quick scan, too, does a fine job of automatically cropping into whatever you've placed on the scanning plate, even when it's tilted.

Also impressive is the way in which the OCR function has been built into the standard installation: although ABBYY Fine Reader 4.02 Sprint is provided as a separate installer, the core OCR libraries are already included with the ScanWizard driver. This means you can scan originals to text or RTF files,

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Word or Excel documents, HTML and even directly to Acrobat 5.0-compatible PDFs with just a press of the relevant button at the front of the machine. You don't need to know anything whatsoever about OCR. The OCR results themselves are competent, preserving text and the original layout, but no graphics.

In terms of image quality, the ScanMaker 4800 is above average for its market. Our tests revealed results that put the machine on a par with products costing nearer £200, but then flatbed scanning quality habitually rises as fast as prices fall.

However, even demanding photo enthusiasts should be happy with the capture quality, especially when scanning in 48-bit mode and bringing the colours back down to 24-bit in Photoshop. A 35mm transparency adaptor lid is available as an extra-cost option for £40.

In line with hardware quality, the ScanWizard driver is rather better than you'd expect for a product in this price bracket. It offers a concise standard mode for beginners, but this can be expanded to full advanced mode with a couple of clicks. This mode provides a good range of colour correction, histogram and curve controls, along with highlight and shadow eyedroppers, and brightness and contrast sliders. Usefully, unsharp masking is included, offering previewed user control over the mask size, strength and threshold. The descreening filter, which can be adjusted between 50lpi and 250lpi, is really very good indeed.

There are some disappointments with the ScanMaker 4800, though. It's a noisy device that your office colleagues might find annoying at times. We also found it to be almost painfully slow when scanning at the full optical sampling rate of 1200ppi.

Upside downside

Another hassle is having to remember to place your originals upside-down on the plate: although ScanWizard provides an iconised rotation menu, this doesn't activate until the second prescan.

As a result, your initial crop of the first overview scan must invariably be conducted on upside-down images unless you remembered to place the originals properly. We had hoped this upside-down lark had been banished from flatbed scanners for good, so it's a shame to see it back again here.

On a more positive note, we encountered no problems when operating the ScanMaker 4800 from Mac OS X. Although ScanWizard only runs in Classic mode, you can still work with the scanner transparently from a normal OS X boot-up, and the smart-buttons can be set up to send scans directly to Carbonized OS X applications, such as Painter 7 and Canvas 8.

This probably makes it the most compatible general-purpose scanner on the market and as such it can be highly recommended. For sheer quality build, good software and great results, the ScanMaker 4800 is fine value for money.