Black Widow 9636 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 scanners and pitted them against each other, we found that, despite their very modest price tags, the quality was generally very good.

The Black Widow 9636 Pro's £109 price tag put it into the mid-range of our group test. It's not the cheapest colour faltbed on the market, but it's still very cheap. For this price you get a 600x1200 optical resolution with 36-bit colour sensitivity, and SCSI connectivity, with a SCSI card included.

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 your new purphase 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 £109 retail price has gone, rather than on scanning technology.

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 (optical character recognition). The 9636 comes with the Presto! range of utilities. They're fairly comprehensive, but the quality isn't quite that of its competitors. Presto! ImageFolio is a picture editor that focuses on more advanced photo re-touching, but for OCR, Presto! PageFiler isn't quite as effective as the programs produced by Xerox or Caere.

If you'll be using your scanner on a regular basis for tasks such as document management and archiving, it's important that scanning doesn't take too long. None of the models we saw was excessively slow, but the 9636 was on the sluggish end of the scale, taking three and a half minutes to complete an A4 scan.

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).

The 9636's 600x1,200 resolution helped it beat all the cheaper units on test, all of which could only view at half this resolution. The colour test showed good focus and sharpness, but was let down by slightly too much contrast - some detail was lost in shadows. However, when compared with other similarly specified machines, the 9636 didn't quite keep up. In the black text test it lacked sharpness, and it failed to register any of the slightly mottled background of the paper, unlike the higher-placed scanners.

At the end of the day, the 9636 Pro is very good value for a SCSI flatbed scanner. However, other manufacturers have managed to beat it both on quality and speed while maintaining a similar or lower price, simply by using parallel or USB connections to save funds. So you may as well buy one of these instead.