Product Reviews

Numbers are important when selling scanners to an unsuspecting public, hence the push for ever-higher sampling rates in scanners that don't really need them. Microtek's ScanMaker 5600 marks a new breed of low-cost flatbed scanners that possess the ability to do something with all that resolution potential. It looks and feels like an everyday office product, but you might be surprised at what it can do with professional photo imaging tasks.

Take the case

The 4.7kg unit is cased in two-tone Microtek style, with a footprint of 290mm x 500mm and rising 115mm from the desktop. The scanning plate is slightly wider than A4 at 216mm x 297mm, and originals must be placed inverted and face down.

The scanner's lid is lined with a padded black background for reflective scans, and its hinge is designed to raise up at the back to accommodate thick original (such as books and non-flat objects) on the plate while keeping the lid horizontal over the top.

An optional, extra-cost transparency adaptor and auto document feeder can be added to the ScanMaker 5600, but these weren't available at the time of testing.

Power is supplied through a cable with a reasonably sized AC adaptor in the plug. The machine is connected to your Mac via USB exclusively.

Five buttons at the front of the scanner allow you to trigger automated functions: scan, copy, email, OCR (optical character recognition) and scan-to-Web. The details of each routine can be customised in a configuration utility, for example, so scans go straight to ImageReady. The only obvious limitation is that scan-to-Web appears to be hard-wired to imira.com rather than supporting other third-party Web gallery sites.

So far, the ScanMaker 5600 is like any other office scanner, including cheaper ones from Microtek. Where it justifies the higher price, though, is the quality of high-resolution scans. The product boasts a sampling rate of 2400 x 4800 dpi (dots per inch) and a 48-bit colour depth, but it's onlyin use

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that the figures start to mean anything. Our tests reveal a scanner that could fall into the 'professional' category.

Scantastic

We used an industry target in our tests and achieved the kind of mean transfer function score we'd normally expect from a scanner costing £500 or more. The green channel, on which scan capture performance relies the most, produced the best score. Photo scans were better than we had anticipated. Line art scans at the maximum optical capture rate of 2400dpi were smooth but detailed. It's just a shame we couldn't try out the transparency adaptor, as it looked very promising given the reflective scan results.

Not everything about the ScanMaker 5600 was as impressive as the image quality. For a start, it's a little noisy in operation. It's also too slow for a scanner targeted principally at office and home users. Preview scans were fast enough, but final colour scans, even at a commonplace 300dpi, seemed to take longer than most office workers would want to wait. Scanning at 2400dpi provided an excuse not just to make a cup of tea but to drink it too. Ironically, this makes the auto document feeder option all the more important, as scanning multiple sheets could otherwise involve you hanging around by the scanner for quite a long time.

This issue is exacerbated under Mac OS X by the lack of native software.

To be fair, Microtek's ScanWizard drivers do run in Classic mode, but not without the occasional hang or unexpected quit. More to the point, running in Classic adds a delay to everything. Whereas pressing one of the quick task buttons on the scanner would produce an instant reaction if you had started up in Mac OS 9, the system seems to wait around for 10 to 20 seconds before the preview begins when in Classic under OS X.

It's also somewhat annoying if you haven't already launched Classic, the quick task buttons do nothing, while the Photoshop plug-in often just falls over.

Carbon dates

It would be wrong of us to be too harsh on this issue, as the ScanWizard drivers work exactly as they should under Mac OS 8.6 and OS 9, which is what most Mac users are running anyway. But OS X users would certainly prefer a more seamless solution, even in Classic. Microtek has announced imminent availability of Carbonized drivers for this and other scanner models, but they hadn't appeared by the time we went to press.

Assuming that Microtek honours this promise, the ScanMaker 5600 would make a good low-cost investment if you want an A4 flatbed with office usability features plus some serious quality clout.