Umax Astra 2500

An A4 flatbed scanner with good scan times and quality. Being USB, it’s easy to install, and bundled Presto PageManager software makes managing scanned documents easy. It has four default modes to scan photos, lineart etc. A custom mode lets you set scan settings and customize defaults.Preview scans took 8 secs, full A4 color image 27 secs, and grayscale and line-art 17 secs. It ships with TextBridge Pro OCR, which gives high accuracy. It ships with Image Folio 4.2. What’s missing are buttons to run scan jobs directly from the scanner, and Mac drivers. Given the price and performance, it’s a good buy.

Ankit Khare