Product Reviews

The Scanjet 4850's specification and price make it a strong candidate for general-purpose use in the home or office. It accepts A4 documents, six negatives or four slides at a time, and it's fast at low resolutions, producing previews in five seconds and A4 300dpi scans in just nine seconds. However, at higher resolutions it slows down considerably: scanning a 6x4" photo at 1,200dpi took six minutes, including a three-minute warm-up.

The TWAIN software for controlling the scanner looks neat and friendly but it's a pain to use. There's a descreen option for scanning

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magazines and newspapers, but nothing to indicate whether it's on or off. The software automatically closes and forgets all its settings between scans. As the settings are hidden behind various drop-down lists, capturing batches of images is extremely tedious.

Colour accuracy is up to scratch, and the 4850 captures natural tones from a wide range of media, including glossy photos, magazine pages, slides and negatives. Our only significant complaint is a slight red-purple tint to greyscales, although this wasn't evident in full-colour images. The 4,800x9,600dpi optical resolution is a bit excessive, though, partly because a 9,600dpi A4 scan would result in a 25GB image, but mostly because the optics are precise enough to create pixel-sharp images at up to only 1,200dpi. Still, 1,200dpi is good enough to turn a 35mm negative into a 6x4" print at 300dpi, and we'd be happy to scan negatives at 2,400dpi and print them at 10x8" to put in a frame, where a small amount of softness in the image will probably go unnoticed.

Ultimately, the scan quality is decent for the price, but it's not good enough to compensate for the annoying software.