Agfa SnapScan 1212P review

When you buy a scanner a whole world of image and document processing opens up for you.

First off, you can replace that boring windows wallpaper with your favourite photo. Then you can have fun scanning in the rest of your family album, cropping, editing and retouching the pictures. Perhaps you've some photos you want to incorporate into a newsletter using a DTP package, or maybe you want a scan of your signature to plonk into letters.

Together with your printer, a scanner can act as a simple photocopier. And if you use the OCR (optical character recognition) software supplied with every budget scanner, you can save yourself having to retype paper documents by scanning them and letting the software turn the image into text that you can edit and correct in your word processor.

No surprise, then, that with so many potential uses, scanners are hugely popular. So much so, that they've given rise to a mass market with ultra-competitive pricing. In fact, scanners could hardly get any cheaper than they already are - if they did, manufacturers would struggle to recoup the basic costs of materials, packaging and shipping, let alone make a decent profit. So if you're interested in playing with pictures, now is as good a time as there's ever been to take the plunge.

We got nine top-selling scanners in to find out which would be our best buy. All were flatbeds, and they ranged in price from inexpensive to very inexpensive. At £120, the Agfa SnapScan 1212P's price put it into the middle ground of our group test.

Scanners, like printers, have very little in terms of on-board controls - all the button pushing is done on-screen at the computer. Therefore the ease of use of a scanner (after its painless setup) is completely down to its bundled software. The Agfa, like all of its peers, provides a small collection of software for various different purposes. There's a TWAIN driver that gets your scans into any TWAIN-compliant program, a photo editing program, and an OCR (optical character recognition) package for converting scans of text into text files. All of these programs are fairly straightforward. The photo editor, Ulead's iPhoto Express, is the strongest of the set. It's one of our favourite programs for editing and re-touching pictures, and you can also create greetings cards, calendars and so on.

The only reliable way to measure a scanner's quality is to perform scans and analyse the results. So 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, using each of the units, to judge colour balance and detail reproduction. Next, we scanned the text at each scanner's highest optical resolution, enabling us to accurately assess focus and definition.

In both of these tests, the 1212P outperformed all the other scanners in the low- to mid-price range, only just being out-classed by the machines costing upwards of £150. It didn't achieve quite the same intensity of contrast as the very best performers, but still displayed very impressive colour accuracy and sharp focus.

In these group comparisons, there always has to be an overall winner, and the Agfa 1212P is it! It offers simply stunning value at £99 (£116) on the street, the drivers and manuals are excellent and it even looks rather spiffy. But most importantly, the quality is only a gnat's whisker away from the best in both photo and line art reproduction. It's not the fastest scanner in the world, but that's just about its only shortcoming. A worthy Top 50 winner.