Flatbed Scanner 

Here’s a flatbed scanner for small offices. The Microtek ScanMaker 3800 scanner supports an optical resolution of 1200x600 dpi and 48-bit color depth. You can count on it for graphics, print speeds, as well as the OCR. Being USB-enabled the scanner is pretty easy to set up. It also has a parallel port and drivers for both PC and Mac. Oss supported

include Win 98/Me/ 2000, Mac OS 8.6

or 9.x. 

The main feature of the scanner is one-touch scanning for which it has five buttons on its front panel. These can be used to scan, copy, e-mail, OCR, and scan images to Web. By default, the scanner’s software ScanWizard automatically selects the right dpi based on the scan job you choose. For example, for onscreen viewing it would automatically take 96 dpi, for printing 300 dpi, and so on. You can also specify your own dpi as per your requirement. After scanning you can send the scanned images to your friends via e-mail, print them, upload them to your Web page or open them into an image-editing software. It supports a maximum document scan size of 8.5x11.7 inches. The scanner is not very heavy either and weighs only 2.7 kg.

We tested the scanner on a PIII/700 with 64 MB RAM, ASUS CUSL2 motherboard, Creative Blaster Extreme graphics card, and Win 98 SE. It got a preview scan in a zippy 9 secs, and an A4-size color image scan at 300 dpi was also a quick 36 secs. Grayscale and lineart images at the same resolution took 18 and 19 secs respectively, which is again quite fast. The quality of these scans wasn’t an issue either, and they were quite clear. For OCR, the scanner ships with ABBY Finereader 4.0 Sprint, which gives very accurate OCR scans. Other software bundled with the scanner include Ulead Photo Explorer 7, Adobe Acrobat Reader 5, Adobe PhotoDeluxe 4 and Adobe PhotoShop 5 LE. 

The bottom line Given the price and performance of the scanner, it’s a pretty good buy. 

Neelima Vaid at PCQ Labs