Product Reviews

Epson has always been well respected for its scanners, despite the fact that it's probably more famous for its printers. In fact, recently Epson has been one of the few companies to continue developing mid- to high-end scanners, as almost every other manufacturer seems desperate to produce cheaper, low-end devices rather than focus on innovation or improving quality.

To be fair, Hewlett-Packard has made an effort to provide something different, but its drive to make its scanners easy to use with one-touch scanning and single-pass, intelligent scanning software still leaves the 5200C with average scan quality (reviewed issue 56, p182). Now Epson has added to its impressive GT-9600 (reviewed issue 54, p176) with the Perfection 1200 Photo, which is an innovative scanner in more ways than one.

The main difference between the Perfection and other scanners in its price range is that it boasts an optical resolution of 1,200 x 2,400ppi, which is even higher than Epson's GT-9600. Instead of the usual single CCD (charge coupled device), it features two, which supposedly helps to improve the quality of the scans.

The Perfection comes with a rather inventive little transparency unit as standard. This is basically a miniature version of a standard transparency hood. It sits directly on the glass plate of the Perfection, plugs into a special socket at the rear of the scanner and allows transparencies up to 5 x 4in in size to be scanned.

All of this is wrapped up in a medium-sized and reasonably well-built package. Unlike the 9600, which is one of the largest A4 flatbed scanners we've ever reviewed, the size of the Perfection is more desk-friendly. Unusually, you'll find a USB socket at the rear of the unit but no parallel or SCSI connection. And, like HP's latest range of scanners, the Perfection features a quick-scan button. However, all this does is scan your system for TWAIN-compatible software and ask

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you to choose a destination for your image from a list of the applications found. The rest of the process is just as if you had fired up the application yourself and selected TWAIN acquire from a drop-down menu. Beyond the Perfection's TWAIN software, there's no other software that's specially designed for button users.

The TWAIN software does have an idiot mode but, strangely, it doesn't default to this setting when you hit the button on the front. The software is comprehensive enough in standard mode for the more advanced user. In addition to all the usual predefined source and destination profiles, you get highlight and shadow controls with eyedroppers for manual selection. You also get gamma, exposure, threshold, grey-balance intensity and saturation controls, as well as an automatic mode. Annoyingly, there's no proper zoom tool available, which means you have to run a preview every time you want to take a close look.

The Perfection looks pretty impressive on paper, but does its performance live up to the hype? For starters, it was considerably quicker than expected, especially at high resolutions. For example, a small, standard photograph-sized scan took just 30 seconds at 600ppi and at the scanner's optical resolution of 1,200ppi took an impressive two minutes and six seconds to drop into Photoshop. A 10 x 8in photograph carried this notable performance forward, concluding in two minutes 39 seconds at 600ppi. It isn't quite as fast as the Umax Astra 1220S (reviewed issue 47, p165), which completed the same task in one minute 14 seconds, but it offers quicker performance than its bigger brother, the Epson GT-9600.

But despite its higher resolution, the Perfection can't quite match the quality of the GT-9600. The difference is marginal and it does manage to outdo both the Astra 1220S and 2400S (reviewed issue 60, p163), producing fractionally crisper and better-balanced images. The transparency adaptor worked well: the high 1,200ppi resolution allows fairly impressive detail capture. When we scanned a 40mm transparency at 1,200ppi, it took just over a minute.

All in all it looks like Epson has come up with a winner here. The Perfection might not be the fastest or have the best quality in the business - those accolades still belong to the Umax Astra 1220S and Epson GT-9600, respectively - but it does offer the best compromise between the two. This is in addition to its superior flexibility (thanks to its transparency adaptor), good build quality and very reasonable price.