Black Widow 4830 Pro 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 models and pitted them against each other, we found that, despite their very modest price tags, the quality was generally very good.

At £49 +VAT, the Black Widow 4830 Pro is the cheapest colour flatbed scanner we've ever seen. In fact, £100 is cheap for a flatbed; this is ridiculously cheap. So we set out to see if it could still get the job done, or if it was just too budget for its own good.

The 4830 has an optical resolution of 300x600dpi, with 30-bit colour sensitivity. While most scannners can see 600dpi or even 1,200dpi, none of these cost less that £100. So for half this price, the specs of the 4830 are perfectly reasonable.

Connection to the PC is via the parallel port. This makes for an easy installation - all you need do is turn off the PC, unplug the printer (if you have one) and plug the scanner into the PC. Most scanners should allow you to 'daisy-chain' your printer, by plugging it into the scanner. This allows both to share one parallel port, but it does mean that you can't scan and print at the same time. The alternatives, SCSI or USB, are potentially a lot faster, but they add to the cost of manufacture, and anyway, scanning never requires a very fast data throughput.

One area we might expect to see compromises on a scanner at this price is build quality. First impressions were good, though. The 4830 feels solid enough, and has a very weighty lid. Opening the lid, however, revealed workings that looked distinctly Heath-Robinson, with lengths of wire looped around cogs in full view. No disaster in itself, but not particularly confidence-inspiring.

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. The former was delivered by Adobe PhotoDeluxe 1, the latter, by Xerox TextBridge Classic. PhotoDeluxe is a competent budget bitmap editor, with a decent range of functions and a friendly user interface. TextBridge is a capable, if basic, OCR package that produces accurate results. No worries here, then.

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 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.

As far as the ability to pick out detail in the photo goes, units with lower optical resolutions were at a clear disadvantage. Consequently, the 4830 failed to keep up with more expensive rivals. On top of this, compared with other 300dpi scanners, reproduction was a little lacking in vibrancy, with heavy shadows and dull highlights. But the 4830's performance was by no means a failure, as the results were still very usable for most purposes.

When scanning black text at maximum resolution, the difference between machines was more pronounced. The low resolution really showed, with the unit producing pixelated jaggies appearing where smooth curves should have been. However, its performance was by no means the worst around.