AcerScan 620U

This

is the latest offering from Acer in their existing range of 620 scanners. It’s

a flatbed, single-pass, CCD color scanner targeted at home and small office

users. Setting up this plug-n-play USB scanner was fast and easy. It comes

with a power adapter, USB cable, installation CD, and a good software

bundle. The manual is excellent, with detailed explanations. The scanner

supports both PCs and Macs.

AcerScan has an optical

resolution of 600x1,200 dpi. The quality of scanned output is pretty good.

It has options for high quality or high-speed scanning. It takes about 9-10

seconds to do a preview scan of an image. We scanned from various media

using the default settings of the scanner—300 dpi for color photographs,

150/300—dpi for grayscale images, and 300 dpi (minimum) for line art

images.

The time taken depends on

whether you’re scanning in high-quality or high-speed modes. The final

scan for a postcard-size color image takes about 23 seconds in high quality.

For a full-page image, it takes more than a minute. In high-speed mode

though, the time taken came down to just 48 seconds. We printed the output

on a HP Deskjet 890C color inkjet printer. Interestingly, there wasn’t too

much of a difference in the images that were scanned in high speed and high

quality.

Grayscale mode scanning works

much faster—taking only about 20 seconds for a full size image at 600 dpi.

The scanner comes with a good

software bundle. This includes Ulead Photo Express, which makes it fast and

easy to modify images and create calendars, screensavers, and greeting

cards. It also has TextBridge Classic OCR software from Xerox that converts

text images into ASCII text files. A copier software is also included.

Overall, the scanner gives

good quality output, and given the price and the software bundle, it makes a

good choice for home or office. It comes with a one-year warranty.