Mustek Be@rPaw review

We didn't expect much refinement of the negative-scanning abilities of a sub-£60 scanner, but the Be@rPaw 4800TA surprised us. You can scan up to eight frames at a time, and the TWAIN driver will automatically select the frames, allowing you to quickly digitise dozens of negatives. It will scan up to six slides at once too.

With five front-panel buttons arranged in the shape of a paw and a high optical resolution of 2,400ppi, the Be@rPaw scores highly for features and design. It's bolstered by a powerful TWAIN interface, which isn't particularly intuitive but offers a good range of tools. Adjustable gamma and tone curves make it easy to manually adjust preview images and the resultant scans, and there's a Smart Photo Refresh function for faded prints.

However, these promising features are let down by the poor quality of the results. All of our negative scans appeared washed out and had a blue cast to them. A few even showed vertical and horizontal banding. Casts can be corrected post-scan, but banding is permanent.

Scans from prints were equally unimpressive. The 7 x 5in 600ppi colour scan wasn't disastrous but, compared to the Canon LiDE 500F, there was a loss of detail in dark areas, and noise was evident in shadow areas. Colours weren't as accurate, so subtle gradations were lost. Our skin-tone test, although not showing a significant loss of detail, had inaccurate colours, with tones appearing too warm. This can be fixed after scanning too, but Epson's 2580 Photo and HP's Scanjet 4070 managed to get it right first time.

Speed didn't help either. Scanning a 6 x 4in print at 150ppi took 16 seconds, while large jobs will really have you tapping your foot. A 7 x 5in print took 40 seconds to scan at 600ppi, while the monochrome image took 30 seconds. It all meant the Mustek was in the bottom three on test.

Bundled software wasn't too inspiring. ABBYY FineReader 4 Sprint lags behind the current version 9, while Ulead PhotoExpress 4 SE isn't particularly powerful either. Even Microtek manages to include Adobe PhotoDeluxe for £44. Ulead's DVD PictureShow 2 SE Basic lets you distribute your images, though.

Ultimately, the Be@rPaw can't compete against the tough competition this month. It's great to see so many features, but with such poor image quality compared to others on test there are few reasons to buy it. If your budget is limited, Microtek's ScanMaker costs only £44 and delivers better quality.