Microtek ScanMaker 8700 Silver review

Flatbed scanners can be picked up very cheaply these days, and even a decent A4 device with support for transparencies won't cost you more than £220 to £300. However, there's a more advanced level of user who needs faster and higher-quality scans with greater colour accuracy but can't afford the £1,000 or more that graphic design or prepress scanners demand. Microtek's ScanMaker 8700 is precisely targeted at this type of mid-range power user - someone perhaps in a marketing or production department who needs a versatile device than can handle photo and transparency reproduction, OCR (optical character recognition) and general office duties with equal ability.

Despite sitting at the top end of the A4 ScanMaker range (Microtek's higher-end devices are labelled ArtixScan), the ScanMaker 8700's hardware specification is fairly ordinary, supporting a maximum optical sampling rate of 1,200ppi at a colour depth of 42-bit. In practice, it all comes down to optical quality and the efficiency of the 24-bit conversion after each scan. In both areas, the ScanMaker 8700 handles itself very well, with its professional-class optics putting it way beyond the cheaper 1,200ppi scanners available.

A scanner of this class would usually come with an SCSI interface rather than USB or parallel, but Microtek has opted for two IEEE-1394 (FireWire) ports instead. The company must feel vindicated after Microsoft's subsequent announcement that Windows XP will follow the FireWire route rather than USB 2. That said, the ScanMaker 8700 comes with a USB port as well. This offers support for non-FireWire-equipped PCs, but Microtek also supplies a two-port FireWire PCI card and cable in the box, and upgrading other PCs in the office to FireWire would only cost around £40 each. We can't see many people spending nearly £900 on a scanner and then plugging it into USB, except maybe for quick scans using a notebook.

In common with all professional-class products from Microtek, the ScanMaker 8700 employs a dual-plate construction, which the company calls EDIT (Emulsion Direct Imaging Technology). This means that transparencies are scanned inside the machine, while reflective originals are scanned conventionally on the exterior flatbed. Scanning transparencies requires loading them into the various supplied templates, which are then fed into the front of the unit. The 'Emulsion Direct' term refers to the fact that there's no glass between the scanning head and the film being scanned.

The theory behind this approach is that you end up with cleaner scans, as a layer of glass can introduce extra dust and scratches, not to mention issues such as Newton Rings. These are problems that affect transparency scanning much more than reflective scanning, so it makes a lot of sense. To this end you're supplied with holders for 4 « 5cm and 6cm films, six-frame 35mm strips, and a special frame for holding a dozen mounted slides.

The only problem here is that transparency scanning is no longer a casual affair where you can simply place slides on the flatbed. Instead, you must pick out an appropriate holder and carefully load the transparencies inside. If you're feeling lazy or need to deal with non-standard film sizes, you can drop loose slides onto the supplied plain glass frame, but this negates the benefit of the EDIT system. Besides, if the films aren't securely held down, you risk them fluttering into the unreachable entrails of the scanner.

Reflective scans are placed on top of the flatbed in the conventional way. The lid is backed with a matt black sheet and mounted on a loose hinge arrangement, which rises easily to accommodate thick originals. The reflective scanning area is a generous 216 « 356mm, and the transmissive scanning area is a reasonable 203 « 254mm. A neat touch with the dual-plate approach is that you can actually scan transparencies with the lid open while loading your reflective scans, or vice versa, which is an important time-saver.