Microtek ScanMaker E6

High quality flatbeds are dropping in price every month. The ScanMaker E6 is a new generation of low-cost, high-performance scanners from Microtek aimed to compete with scanners such as the Umax Vista S12LE.

The unit is fairly compact and has a simple design with just a single on/off switch and two LEDs, one labelled Power and the other labelled Ready. Despite its modest size, the ScanMaker E6 can handle documents up to a maximum of 216 x 330mm. The hinged lid can be raised by about an inch to accommodate reasonably thick books or can be removed entirely if necessary.

The E6 uses a SCSI-2 interface and comes bundled with an Adaptec AVA-1502AE card as standard. Alternatively, you can connect it to an existing SCSI card if you have one. The scanner has both SCSI in and out ports so it can be used anywhere in the SCSI chain.

The ScanMaker E6 features an optical resolution of 600 x 1,200 dpi. However, by using software interpolation the scanner can achieve a maximum 4,800 x 4,800 dpi. Scans are performed with a single pass of the scanning mechanism, even at maximum resolution. Scanning speed rates about average. For example, a page of A4 scanned at 300dpi in 30-bit colour takes just less than two minutes. The Vista S12 manages to achieve this in 45 seconds, but it's one of the fastest scanners around.

Microtek's ScanWizard for Windows software controls the scanning process. The E6 is TWAIN-compliant which means you can access and control the device from any TWAIN-compliant software such as Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Photoshop. ScanWizard allows you to control all aspects of the scanning operation. The Advance Image Enhancer processes the document automatically as it's scanned. You can adjust the contrast, brightness, colour balance, highlights and shadows, and you can even apply a colour tint or a filter to sharpen or blur the image.

The quality of the scanned images is excellent. The ScanMaker E6 produces accurate scans in terms of both sharpness and colour balance. When used for scanning black and white photographs, the ScanMaker E6 can distinguish a maximum of 1,024 different levels of grey and there's no evidence of colour wash in greyscale mode. This is much better than most other flatbed scanners, which generally can only manage 256-greyscale recognition. In 30-bit colour mode the E6 is even more impressive, with the ability to determine a maximum of 1.07 billion different colours in an image. A 24-bit display can't show all these colours, but 30-bit colour still improves colour fidelity in the same way that 16-bit CDs mastered in 18-bit have improved sound.

Scanning documents at high resolutions consumes large amounts of computer resources, both memory and hard disk space. Consequently, you'll find it difficult to scan at the higher resolutions offered by the ScanMaker E6. My PC has 48Mb of RAM and at 1,200 x 1,200dpi I could only manage a scan that was about the size of a postage stamp. To get the most out of the ScanMaker E6 then, you'll need a PC with plenty of memory and a big hard disk.

The ScanMaker E6 comes with software for retouching images and reading text. Microtek has bundled a copy of the PC Pro Excellence-winning Ulead PhotoImpact 3 (see issue 25, p208), which allows you to edit and enhance scanned photos with a wide variety of tools and special effects. Also bundled is Caere OmniPage Limited Edition which can be used for Optical Character Recognition (OCR). OmniPage is very effective, and I was impressed at the accuracy it achieved when reading some quite complex documents and converting them to standard text. OmniPage lets you scan documents, OCR them and then save them automatically into your favourite word processor document file format.