Product Reviews

The world of affordable flatbed scanners is not one that has seen much innovation in recent times. Whereas other areas of the IT industry have been racing along at a dizzying rate, flatbed scanners have been stuck at optical resolutions of 300ppi and 600ppi for quite some time. It's true that prices have dropped to ridiculously low levels, but the higher end of the market has seen a surprising lack of activity.

Epson's newest scanner, the GT-9600, breaks from this trend in two ways. First, it's considerably more expensive than most of the bargain scanners currently hitting the market. In fact, compared with Microtek's slim 336CX USB (see opposite), the GT-9600's price of £516 is astronomical.

So what do you get for all this extra cash? Well, that's where the second distinguishing factor comes in. Unlike the scanners featured in our last Labs test (issue 41), with optical resolutions of 600ppi or less, the GT-9600 ups the ante to 800ppi. Not only that, but its vertical resolution reaches a mind-boggling 3,200ppi. Unless you're magnifying images or working with transparencies using the optional transparency hood (£260), this sort of resolution is a bit pointless, but it does at least put some daylight between the GT- 9600 and the rest of the rabble, and the boost in resolution is evident in the scans it produces.

Another important consideration that sets the GT-9600 apart from cheaper devices is its build quality. In appearance, the scanner is a monster when compared to units like the Microtek 336CX. For starters, sit it on a desk and it rises almost half a foot above it; it measures a lengthy 562mm from back to front without any cables protruding from the rear, and it's more than a foot wide. Needless to say, you're going to need some serious desk acreage. Its bulk, however, is accompanied by a build quality that's a lot more substantial than most of the light and generally flimsy scanners that characterise the £100 or less price point. The lid in particular doesn't flex too much, nor does it move when in place. A two-point hinge also allows for

Of course, with an optical resolution as high as 800ppi, it would be foolish to consider any connection other than SCSI, and to this end the GT-9600 ships with an Adaptec PCI SCSI II card and cable. Once you've connected and installed the TWAIN Pro software, you're ready to start scanning. The software itself offers plenty of useful features for tweaking an image before performing the final scan, but there's nothing much out of the ordinary. To take the guesswork out of which resolution should be used for what task, there are a number of preset options such as prepress 150lpi and several profiles optimised for Epson's inkjet printers. It's handy, but it only goes as far as predetermining resolution, halftoning and sharpness. As far as tone correction, tuning exposure, gamma, highlight and shadow, threshold, saturation and grey balance intensity values are concerned, you can either do it manually afterwards or ask TWAIN Pro to do it automatically.

The burning question is whether the GT-9600's 800 « 3,200ppi resolution makes a difference to performance compared with that of our current A List scanner, the Umax Astra 1220S (reviewed issue 47, p165). Obviously, the higher resolution of the GT-9600 has a negative effect on speed. For example, in 36-bit colour at its optical resolution, the GT-9600 took a full three minutes, 49 seconds to scan a 10 « 8in photograph which, not surprisingly, was a lot slower than the Astra's comparatively nippy one minute, 14 seconds. However, even when scanning the same image at a lower 600ppi resolution, the GT-9600 dragged its heels, finishing the task in one minute, 53 seconds.

Is it worth the wait? Well, a close examination in Photoshop of the resulting image files suggests a resounding yes. You have to zoom in very close but, once you have, the difference in the sharpness and breadth of detail captured between the Astra and the GT-9600 is more significant than I expected. The GT-9600's scans revealed even more of the fine detail, especially in darker areas, from our test images than the Astra - which is no mean feat.

There's no doubt that the GT-9600 performs better than any other scanner we've reviewed in terms of image quality, but the question is whether or not it's worth the hefty price premium. For most people, the instant answer would be no, regardless of the inclusion of a cut-down version of Photoshop 5; also, scanning at such high resolutions would only waste precious disk space. It's not the quickest scanner around either, but the minority who absolutely have to have the highest quality need look no further.