Product Reviews

Following the success of the Umax Astra 1200S scanner (reviewed issue 41, p140), which won a coveted PC Pro Quality award, we've had more than our fair share of reader enquiries regarding its successor, the Astra 1220S. In fact, the 1200S has now been discontinued so it's hardly surprising to hear that dealers have been fast running out of stocks.

The new and improved 1220S is finally here to the joy and relief of many, I'm sure. The 1220S certainly looks different to its predecessor. It has a more compact, low-profile case that feels a little more solidly-built, too. The scanning area is large enough to accommodate documents or images up to Letter size (8.5 x 11.7in).

This time round, the 1220S sports a SCSI-II interface, as opposed to the SCSI-I of the 1200S. And even if your PC doesn't already have a SCSI card plugged in, you can still connect the scanner using the ISA card that comes in the box. This advance should see an improvement in scanning speed over the 1200S which was no slouch itself, coming third in the Labs test earlier this year.

If you really can't face the rigmarole of opening up your PC to install the card then the 1220P, a parallel-port version of the scanner, is also available. For those who don't already own the software needed for processing scanned images, there's a useful but fairly standard software bundle included. Adobe PhotoDeluxe takes care of basic image-editing tasks, Recognita Standard 3.2 turns your paper documents into electronic format and Presto PageManager software deals with document and image management.

Colour depth has also been upgraded. Although the 600 « 1,200ppi optical resolution remains the same, the 1220S can boast the ability to capture in 36-bit colour as opposed to the 30-bit that the 1200S was capable of. It's debatable, however, whether this makes that much of a difference.

Umax's

In practice, the improvements seem to work. After a painless installation procedure in which the TWAIN software is installed, I set about putting the 1220S through its paces. The first thing to impress me was how quick it was. Connected to a Pentium II/266 system with 128Mb of RAM, a 600ppi scan of a 6 x 4in photograph took just 45 seconds to appear in Photoshop. The same photo scanned at 1,200ppi took just over two minutes. A bigger 10 x 8in print posed no problem either, completing in one minute and 14 seconds at 600ppi. All in all, it's a highly praiseworthy performance.

Quality turned out to be the most impressive we've seen from a scanner yet. In a side-by-side comparison with the 1200S, the 1220S produced marginally better results. Close inspection revealed better contrast and fractionally more detail. The scans also had a sharper look to them, with crisper edges and sharper fine lines. It appears that the increase in colour depth from 30-bit to 36-bit made a difference after all.

When compared to the scans produced by a professional drum scanner, the 1220S also performed better than most. In terms of colour, the 1220S beat everything apart from the Jade 2, which comes with far more powerful scanning software and colour management tools. If you can be bothered to put in the time, you might well be able to get better results than this, but without more advanced calibration tools and TWAIN software, it's always going to be a case of hit and miss.

Overall, the long-awaited Astra 1220S has turned out to be as much of a winner as its predecessor. In fact, the 1220S is an all-round improvement, with excellent image quality and extremely fast scan speeds. The final feather in its cap is the very reasonable £229 price tag, which only serves to strengthen the case for yet another award.