Product Reviews

Acer is better known for its PCs and notebooks than its peripherals, but the company also produces kit ranging from keyboards to budget scanners. The Brisa 310S flatbed scanner (reviewed issue 41, p128) made an unimpressive PC Pro debut but was amazingly cheap at just £89. The 610S, as its name may suggest, sits at the higher end of Acer's range, but the question is whether it can improve upon its predecessor's performance.

The price, again, is not at the higher end of things. At just £139, the 610S is extremely reasonably priced for a high-resolution scanner. It may be £60 more expensive than the 310S but it offers a considerably higher specification, with its optical resolution of 600 x 1,200ppi.

Apart from this pair of obvious differences, there's little to separate the two scanners. The 610S looks identical to the 310S with its compact, low-profile case and fairly plain styling - just a single LED adorns the front of the scanner. The hinged lid can be raised to accommodate thicker source material such as books and magazines, and the unit feels reasonably well put together despite a small amount of play in the lid. Apart from this, the 30-bit colour depth is also the same as the 310S, while the increased resolution allows for interpolated scans up to 9,600 « 9,600ppi. The scanner can boast ten-bit greyscale scanning, too.

Like the 310S, the 610S is a SCSI device, so you can simply connect it to an existing card via the SCSI interface at the rear of the scanner. Alternatively, you use the ISA card supplied, although this option will involve delving inside your PC to slot it in. You can get hold of a parallel port version - the 610P - but you'll have to wait a lot longer for those big scans.

Installation is a fairly simple affair after this, though you'll have to wade through some distinctly dodgy translation throughout the intro screen and help files. If you already have a favoured image-editing package like Photoshop or PhotoImpact,

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the MiraScan TWAIN module offers a reasonably advanced feature set and isn't too confusing to use. In addition to brightness and contrast controls, preprocess colour adjustments can be made - hue and saturation controls are available - and there's a histogram tool, too. It's adequate rather than mind-blowing stuff. If you're not already in possession of a decent photo-editing tool, you can use Ulead's iPhoto Plus to acquire and perform basic image manipulation tasks. Finally, there's an OEM version of TextBridge for converting text-based documents to digital format.

It's all very well to boast a very low price point, but if at the end of the day the performance just doesn't cut it you may as well bite the bullet and spend a little more money. Fortunately, the 610S is a more impressive performer than the 310S. The first thing you'll notice is just how quick it is. Using the supplied SCSI card, it's considerably faster than the Linotype Jade 2 (reviewed issue 45, p171).

At 600ppi a 6 x 4in snapshot-sized photo scanned in one minute and 14 seconds from start to finish, compared with the Jade 2's one minute and 55 seconds. A 10 x 8in photo at the same resolution took two minutes and 49 seconds - the Jade 2 took a shade over five minutes - and a full A4-size magazine page at 100ppi took just 20 seconds.

In terms of image quality, however, the 610S is less impressive. In comparison to our professional bureau scanner, colour accuracy is good but isn't at the same level as the Jade 2. In particular, its reproduction of cyan lets it down. The colour controls in the driver should help you to get closer to what you're after, but without more advanced calibration control it's always going to be a case of hit and miss.

Detail capture is good, as you might expect from a 600 x 1,200ppi scanner, but despite a good level of contrast the scanner tends to gloss over finer areas of detail, and tweaking the brightness and contrast controls couldn't make what were initially very dark scans any better. One thing is clear: it can't quite match the likes of the Jade 2 or the Agfa SnapScan 600 (reviewed issue 45, p176) and comes nowhere near the results produced by a professional drum scanner.

The main point in favour of the VuegoScan Brisa 610S is its low price. At £139, it's less than half the price of either the Agfa SnapScan 600 or the Linotype Jade 2 scanners reviewed last month, both of which boast similar specifications. Despite some reservations about the quality, it's worth considering if you're on a restricted budget.