Linotype Jade 2 review

The scanner market has been moving in a distinctly down-market direction in recent times. You can now buy a flatbed for as little as £50, which is something that was unheard of two years ago. You still have to pay a little more for quality, but there's no denying that you can get a lot more bang for your buck than in the past.

Cuts in prices have pushed flatbeds firmly into the consumer market and have, inevitably, made them easier to use. HP's 5100C (reviewed issue 44, p171) took this to extremes with its photocopier-like operation and idiot-proof Scanner Wizards. Simplicity, in this case at least, meant sacrificing flexibility. However, if you wanted more professional-level features in a scanner you had to pay disproportionately more money. Linotype's Jade 2 is the first scanner I've seen to fill that gap, offering more advanced features than you'll find in any other scanner in its price range.

The Jade 2's ColorFactory Pro software is the hub of the package and offers advanced filtering and colour correction tools, as well as full-blown colour calibration tools and a host of input and output colour-matching profiles. The range of pre-process adjustments that can be made is nothing short of staggering. Even the basic features are more advanced than you get with most sub-£500 scanners. For example, you get to choose whether the final output file is in CMYK or RGB, on top of the usual choice between line-art, greyscale and colour.

In addition, there are a number of filters that can be applied to your scanned image, and once you've carried out a pre-scan the ColorAssistant provides a quick way of hand tweaking light and dark levels, contrast, reducing colour cast and colour. As you make your changes, they take immediate effect in the pre-scan window. This is just scratching the surface, however: clicking on the Color Correction button takes you to a higher level of complexity, where adjustments such as sector and finefield correction can be made.

Make no mistake, this software isn't for the first-time scanner user, even in ColorAssistant mode. Needless to say, it's not the most straightforward of TWAIN drivers - I found calibrating the scanner, using the calibration target and colour data supplied, more than a little fiddly, and it's not easy to tell which colour profile you're using at any one time either.

On the hardware side, the Jade 2 boasts an optical resolution of 600 « 1,200dpi, 30-bit colour depth and 256-greyscale scanning. It will take reflective media up to 355 x 216mm in size or transparencies measuring 297 x 216mm using the optional transparency hood. The interpolated resolution goes up to 3,600 x 3,600dpi, but in most cases the resulting file size would be far too large to be usable.

Once calibrated, I performed a series of tests to see if the quality of the scanning hardware came up to scratch. I wasn't disappointed. In a side-by-side comparison with the PC Pro award-winning Umax Astra 1200S (reviewed0 issue 41, p140) the Jade 2 came out extremely well, which isn't surprising since the two scanners share the same engine. If anything, the Jade 2's scans look fractionally crisper and more detailed.

When it came to the colour accuracy tests, the Jade 2 repeated its slight superiority over the Astra. Compared with scans made by our bureau's drum scanner, it got closer than the Astra, reproducing cyan and yellow especially well. In terms of speed, the Jade 2 is just as impressive. I connected the scanner using the supplied SCSI card to a P133 system with 32Mb of RAM, and got some impressive results. A 6 x 4in photograph at 600dpi scanned within one minute and 55 seconds, while a large 10 x 8in print, at the same resolution, completed in just over five minutes.