Black Widow 9636 HiRes review

As the PC moves into the creative areas of imaging and desktop publishing which have been traditionally dominated by the Mac, the market for accompanying peripherals has mushroomed. Never before has there been such a wide variety of digital cameras and scanners available. Increased competition, specifically in the scanner market, has dragged prices down with it. Although a flatbed for less than £200 was once unheard of, there are many different sub-£200 units now available. Indeed, the Value award winner from the PC Pro scanners Labs back in issue 41, the Watford Aries Scan-It Pro 4830P, was just £79.

More recently, the Acer Vuego Scan Brisa 610S (reviewed issue 46, p171) impressed us with its low £139 price tag. Great value for money for a 30-bit 600 x 1,200ppi scanner, but it came at the expense of scan quality. The Black Widow 9636 HiRes attempts to offer greater quality for not much extra cash, and comes into a similar price bracket as the excellent Umax Astra 1220S (reviewed issue 47, p165).

It's certainly more substantial in appearance than the 1220S, although the maximum scanning area is the same, allowing documents or photographs up to A4 in size to be scanned. The low profile, compact design of the 1220S is a lot more appealing than this rather old-fashioned look. The lid has an extending hinge to accommodate thicker and more awkward items, like books and magazines, and the whole thing feels pretty solidly built. Like the 1220S, the HiRes is a SCSI-II device and comes complete with a SCSI-II card and cable. This makes installation, once you've plugged the SCSI card in, mercifully straightforward - just install the TWAIN software and you're away.

On top of the essential TWAIN software, you get a pretty impressive selection of software for your money. First on the list is Adobe Photoshop 4 LE, a cut-down edition that lacks some of the high-end features of the full package. You also get the full shrinkwrapped copy of TextBridge Pro 98 (reviewed issue 39, p208), one of the better OCR (optical character recognition) packages around, instead of the usual Classic edition.

Also impressive is that this scanner can capture images at up to 36-bit colour and has an optical resolution of 600 x 1,200ppi, although the latter is fast becoming the standard resolution for scanners in this price band. The TWAIN software offers options for 12-bit greyscale, halftone and line-art scanning. You also get tools for controlling brightness and contrast, hue and saturation, gamma and tone.

The SCSI-II card should help the speed in theory, but in practice it's by no means the fastest scanner we've seen. In fact, it's slower than both the Acer and the Umax. Connected to a Pentium II/350 with 128Mb of RAM, preview scans took a frustratingly long time at 23 seconds each, while scanning a large 10 x 8in photograph took five minutes and 45 seconds at 600ppi. That's more than 40 seconds longer than the Astra took to complete the same task.

Unfortunately, as with the Acer, the image quality isn't much to write home about. Upon close examination, the scans produced using the HiRes look distinctly blurred compared with the results of the currently A Listed Umax Astra 1220S (see p68) and even when compared to the Acer, the results looked somewhat fuzzy. At least the images were more crisp than those produced by HP's 5100C (reviewed issue 44, p171).

Colour matching was more impressive but, even here, when compared to results produced using a professional drum scanner, both the Umax and the Acer came out on top. I couldn't remedy the matter by tweaking the settings either, and using the auto-exposure tool to set colour levels automatically as well as hue and saturation just seemed to make things worse. To be honest, you're not going to get very far without more powerful software controls.