Microtek Phantom 330 review

More than almost any other peripheral, the price of a decent scanner has plummeted over the last few years.

Five years ago a colour flatbed would have cost around a grand, but now you can pick one up for ten times less. The reason for this is pretty simple: items like CPUs keep getting faster, so the manufacturers can keep charging lots of money for the increasing performance. However, there's not much you can add to a scanner once it has colour capability and around 300dpi (dots per inch) resolution, so prices just keep on tumbling.

In fact, this scanner comes with a quoted resolution of thousands of dpi, but that's just a marketing game and it can't really see that much detail. Given the price of this unit, we weren't expecting much beyond a couple of plastic boxes with glass on top, and that's pretty much what we got. The Paperport 3000 is slightly unusual though, in that the top hinges along the length of the case rather than the width. The unit is a parallel port device, plugging into the port on the back of the computer where a printer normally attaches, with a pass-through connector so you can continue to use the printer normally.

The scanner comes with a thin paper manual, covering the bare essentials - how to unwrap and plug it in, basically. As well as TWAIN-compatible drivers, which let you scan images straight into almost any application, it comes with a couple of apps of its own.

The Phantom 330 has pretty conventional software facilities. The OCR package included is Caere OmniPage Limited Edition, but you can only use this 25 times before you have to phone up and register, which is extremely annoying. It also comes with Ulead Photo Express, a competent if basic photo editing app. When testing this scanner with photos, I set the resolution to 300dpi. There's no point in going higher than this, since higher quoted resolutions are simply interpolated, meaning that the hardware literally guesses the additional pixels, not that it can actually see them. If you use the really high settings, all you'll get is an absolutely enormous scan with no actual increase in detail - a 6x4in photo scanned at 4,800dpi results in a 1.5Gb file!

When scanning colour photos, the Microtek performed very well - its contrast was better, resulting in blacks that were black, rather than being slightly grey. As far as picking up on fine detail goes, results were again very impressive. Almost everyone who buys a scanner will want to scan loads of pictures of their family and friends, so reproduction of skin tones is important. The Microtek didn't do brilliantly on this score, making peachy skin colours fairly dull, but the results were certainly very acceptable. Scanning speed was fine, with a full page of A4 taking just a couple of minutes to transfer.

If you're just looking for a way of getting your holiday snaps into electronic form or producing pics for your web site, there's really no reason to spend any more than the 100-odd quid this scanner will set you back. What's more, for the asking price the quality is outstanding.