Acer VUEGO Scan 620ST review

Low pricing has recently brought scanners to the masses.

Good news in itself, but this has also led to money being ploughed into boosting these cheap scanners' performance. So when we gathered nine top-selling scanners and pitted them against each other, we found that, despite their very modest price tags, the quality was generally very good.

The Acer Vuego Scan 620ST is in the upper price bracket of the models we tested, although £159 is not what you could call expensive. While the cheapest on test is less than a third of this price, the Acer offers a 600x1200 resolution (double that of the cheapest), a SCSI interface with a PCI card included, and a transparency unit for scanning negatives and slides.

SCSI seems to be an increasingly popular interface for the PC, at least amongst scanner manufacturers. It's fast, and once you've got a SCSI interface, you can daisy-chain up to seven devices onto the one port. The downsides are that it's an expensive technology, and long SCSI chains can be a real headache to set up.

The inclusion of a SCSI card in the price of this scanner is a good thing - you wouldn't want to get the thing home only to find you can't plug it into your PC without spending more money. However, as these cards usually cost at least £50, this is inevitably where a fair proportion of the £159 retail price has gone, rather than on scanning technology.

The Acer's add-on unit for scanning transparencies requires its own power supply and a cable to connect it to the main unit (both supplied). Aside from that, though, there were no other complicated setup procedures, and it turned out to be fairly simple in use. The adaptor itself is integrated into the lid of the scanner, with the separate power supply enabling the backlight to shine though the transparencies. The adaptor accepts either 35mm negatives or slides, and a guide frame ensures your film is correctly positioned. All that's the needed is to select whether you're scanning negatives or positive slides in the TWAIN driver. Sadly, we found a problem with the guide frame: it didn't hold the film securely enough to ensure really good focus. Another drawback with scanning small slides and negatives is that the limited resolution means your final scans aren't that big - a problem if you want to print them at much more than three times the size of the original film. It's worth remembering that dedicated film scanners generally have optical resolutions of well over 2000dpi!

Once you've got the scans into your PC using the basic control software, you'll need to be able to do things with them, like photo re-touching and OCR. For this, you'll be wanting some software, and Acer happily obliges, bundling Ulead iPhoto Plus 4 and Xerox TextBridge Classic. iPhoto lets you edit and re-touch photos as well as create greetings cards, calendars and so on, and TextBridge is a capable, if basic, OCR (optical character recognition) package that produces accurate results.

While specs and software are interesting, the only reliable way to measure a scanner's quality is to perform scans and analyse the results. And that's exactly what we did, using a colour photograph, a black-and-white text document, and a special scanner test target (this helps show up problems with colour accuracy and so forth). We scanned the colour photo at 600dpi to judge colour balance and detail reproduction. Next, we scanned the text at the highest optical resolution, enabling us to accurately assess focus and definition.