Microtek ScanMaker Office Pro

Professional Desktop Publishing requires professional equipment, and the ScanMaker Office Pro from Microtek is aimed at the quality end of the market. This large flatbed colour scanner is capable of handling documents up to 355 x 210mm and features a single pass CCD (charge-coupled device) allowing it to recognise up to 68.7 billion colours.

The ScanMaker Office Pro bundle includes an Adaptec AVA-1502E SCSI-2 interface card, a SCSI cable and an automatic document feeder (ADF). There's also a CD-ROM containing all the software that you need for image processing including Ulead's PhotoImpact, Caere OmniPage LE OCR software and ImagePals2Go graphics processing package.

The ADF is attached to the scanner with a short interface cable and can handle up to ten sheets. These are placed face down in the input hopper. Scanning multiple pages with the ADF isn't particularly quick and each page takes about a minute to complete. However, if you regularly scan lots of single pages then the ADF is very convenient.

Microtek supplies a utility called Dynamic Colour Rendition with the scanner. This is a calibration and colour correction system which is designed to provide more vibrant and accurate colours. The DCR kit consists of an industry-standard colour target card which serves as the colour reference for the scanner. By scanning this card, a file is created on your hard disk which is compared with the true values for the colours on the card and subsequent scans adjusted accordingly.

Maximum optical resolution is 600 x 1,200dpi, but software interpolation can boost this to a maximum of 4,800 x 4,800dpi. Scanning speed is impressive with a single page of A4 taking just 45 seconds at 300dpi resolution. Scans are both accurate and sharp with good colour balance. When scanning black and white photographs, the ScanMaker Office Pro doesn't produce any colour bleed. The 36-bit colour depth of the ScanMaker means that it can recognise up to 68.7 billion colours, and the colour scans are extremely accurate.

The scanning process is controlled via Microtek's ScanWizard software. This is TWAIN-compliant, so you can scan from within your favourite applications. The ScanWizard lets you control all aspects of the scanning operation. You can choose to preview the page and then select a specific area to be scanned at a particular resolution. Controls are provided in the Advance Image Enhancer to process the document automatically as it's scanned. You can adjust the contrast, brightness, colour balance, highlights and shadows. You can apply a colour tint or a filter to sharpen or blur the image if necessary.

Microtek has tried to ensure that the ScanMaker Office Pro is a complete solution, and consequently the software bundle is comprehensive. Ulead PhotoImpact 3 allows you to edit and enhance scanned photos with a wide variety of tools and special effects, and it was a PC Pro Excellence award winner (reviewed issue 25, p208). ImagePals2Go is a set of three utilities: an Album for storing and sorting various image files, a Graphics File Viewer and an Image Editor which you can use to edit a scanned image.

With its ADF, the ScanMaker Office Pro is aimed at scanning text en masse, and so Microtek has included a copy of Caere OmniPage Limited Edition. This can be used for Optical Character Recognition (OCR), converting the page to text for editing. OmniPage lets you scan documents, OCR them and then save them into your favourite word processor document file format. If a document contains a mixture of text and graphics, then you can mark areas to be converted to text, separately.