Product Reviews

The ScanPartner 600C has a distinctive construction due to the integral automatic document feeder. The cover is mounted on a pivoted hinge, so that it can be raised from either the left or right-hand side. A document feed tray on top of the cover can accommodate 50 sheets ranging from A5 up to 216 x 279mm, and the maximum scan area is economically sized at 310 « 220mm. The continuous feed feature of the ADF is a great labour-saving attribute. However, if colour images are to be scanned successively at high resolution you'll need a lot of free hard disk capacity. A typical A4 colour scan at 300dpi is around 20Mb in size if saved in an uncompressed file format.

Along the length of the case are 25-pin and 50-pin SCSI connectors with a terminator switch. A rotary SCSI channel selector gives a range from zero to nine. The interface card supplied is an Adaptec AVA-1505

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AT-to-SCSI host adaptor. The TWAIN-compliant software interface by CFM is simple to use but not as well featured as HP's DeskScan II.

The most impressive feature of the ScanPartner is its speed. In conjunction with the sheet feeder, monochrome scan rates reached as high as 15 pages per minute, putting it in a resounding first place, around 75 per cent faster than the second-place Epson unit.

Unfortunately, the impressive performance doesn't continue with the 600C's image quality. Our colour photographic reproduction tests revealed significant problems with the unit's colour balance, which deviated from the original to an unacceptable extent. With greyscale scans, high-contrast areas were well reproduced, but incorrect gamma adjustment meant that the images appeared too bright, with light greys being rendered as near-white. Resolving detail proved to be another problem, with missing fine lines and small details that other scanners managed to pick up. Black and white text scans were satisfactory in retaining a reasonable degree of image accuracy for the purpose of OCR; in fact, it's obvious that the unit has been optimised specifically for that purpose. The software bundle reinforces this, with bundled titles including Avail Document Management 2.1 and Xerox Text Bridge 3.03.

The ScanPartner 600C is a fast, no-nonsense document management tool. That level of performance doesn't come cheap, and at £1,395 we'd expect better image quality.