Great Bargain Scanner - REVIEW UPDATED

I've used a lot of scanners in my life. I used to sell them too while I was a consultant to professional imaging/prepress companies.

While the Microtek ScanMaker 4800 is nothing near the quality of a professional level Epson (or professional Microtek), it's quality is perfect for what it was designed for: a low-cost, general purpose, casual use scanner. That's why it has the handy fax/copy/e-mail/print buttons on the front. You would never find those buttons on a pro level scanner. It's easy to set up (got it running in XP and scanning in less than 10 mins.), and very easy to use. Those who know what they're doing with a scanner will definitely opt to use the advanced interface of the ScanWizard s/w.

One note about scanning in general. There are a lot of comments on the quality of the low-cost scanners these days. I've seen a lot of people complain about the quality of the 4800. Scanning in general, even more so with budget scanners, requires some degree of knowledge to get a good quality scan. The default scan quality of pretty much every budget scanner sucks. They almost always need some tweaking of white point, histogram, balance curves, and brightness/contrast.

The easiest way for beginners to get decent results is to scan with default settings into an app like Photoshop (which comes with the 4800) and immediately apply "auto-levels" from the image menu. Those that are picky may need to apply more tweaking, but for most, 90% of the time that should do the trick.

Another note on checking scan quality is: don't use magazines or printed materials to check the quality. Bulk printed materials are printed relatively badly. If you look close enough you can see the grain of a magazine fairly easily. Testing with these show moire and color noise pretty easily just because of the nature of the source. Instead pick a high quality photograph or lithograph to test with.

I also see some online articles complaining about speed. Of course, they're scanning at high (600+ dpi) res for a full 8.5x11". You definitely can't expect that to be fast on a $100 scanner. An 8.5" x 11" x 600dpi x 48-bit image is about 192 MB. How can anyone expect that much information to be transferred that fast on a USB 1.1 bus? Typically the throughput of a USB 1.1 bus is only about 4-6 Mbps anyways, which would require just over 6 minutes to transfer. For those kinds of images you really need to go SCSI, USB 2.0, or Firewire, thereby upping the cost. Most people don't need scans at those resolutions anyways. They just think they do.

The film strip scanner is a bust though. But that's pretty much expected. To get decent film or transparency scans you need to be scanning at a minimum 4800x4800 dpi (real optical, not interpolated). If you really need to do serious film scanning, then I would suggest looking at a real 35mm film specific scanner, or find a local photo lab that will do it for you cheap. If you really must use the film adapter included with the 4800, a good tip would be to get a piece of glass, lay the filmstrip on the scan bed, put the glass over it, and then lay the light lid on top of that. The film needs to be flat up against the bed, and the built-in holder on the lightlid is pretty poor at doing that. Either way don't expect too much from it.

All in all, the 4800 isn't a bad deal at all at around $100, people just have to set their expectations properly.

UPDATE (10/23/02): Well, I did like this scanner. It had a great mix of price, features, and scan quality. Unfortunately, after about a month of service it has died. Not sure of the exact cause, but it's probably power related, because the back end of the scanner (where the PCB and chips are) heats up to un-touchable temperatures. It's no longer recognized by the USB bus either.
I brought it back to Best Buy, and actually made use of $9.99 Product Replacement Plan that I bought at the time of purchase (wow, never thought that type of insurance would pay off, but for $10 I couldn't resist). Looks like that was a smart move. At return time I spoke to one of the sales guys in the scanner dept. and he mentioned that they've been getting a lot of DOA returns on these things. Looks like reliability is an issue. Not surprising since they appear to manufactured in China, which unfortunately still has inconsistent manufacturing quality in the PC/Peripherals industry. I picked up a Canon CanoScan Lide 30 scanner to replace the Scanmaker. I guess we'll see how this one fares.