Epson GT-7000 review

Almost all scanners these days are of the flatbed variety, which has more or less stamped out the old hand-held and sheet-fed types.

Flatbeds work in much the same way as a photocopier - the paper is placed face down on an A4-size glass top, and it's scanned from underneath. This arrangement produces the highest quality scans. Sheet-fed scanners (in which the document is fed through the scanner, as in a fax machine) are still available, though. This is because they take up less desk space and are well suited to doing rough-and-ready scans of a whole stack of papers unattended. While this is ideal for archiving, most people place a higher value on the quality of their scans. For them, a flatbed is the much better alternative.

The Epson GT-7000 comes in at the more expensive end of high-street scanners, although £173 isn't a huge price to pay. For this amount of money, you get a machine that can scan at 600x1,200dpi (dots per inch) optical resolution with 36-bit colour sensitivity, a SCSI interface with card included and a very respectable software bundle.

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 it 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 £190 retail price has gone, rather than on scanning technology.

It would seem that part of the budget has been dedicated to build quality, and this can only be a good thing. The Epson's build is solid and weighty, with a mauve flash on the corner to give it a touch of style. This piece of kit certainly looks the part.

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). For picture editing, Epson include Adobe's PhotoDeluxe 2, which is a great program, offering lots of powerful editing functions along with a user-friendly interface. Xerox TextBridge Classic is a more basic, but still perfectly capable application that produces accurate results for OCR. On top of all this, you also get Adobe PageMill 3, which is a superb web design package that retails for £93. If you're looking to get into web design, this factor alone could swing it for you.

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 to judge colour balance and detail reproduction, a black-and-white text document to assess focus and definition, and a special scanner test target (this helps show up problems with colour accuracy and so forth).

In both tests, the Epson did extremely well, justifying its slightly higher price tag, but it was in the text test that it really shone. The text came up sharp-edged and solid black while still managing to show some of the printing irregularities, and kept the background sufficiently white while still picking out the mottling of the paper.

If you're looking for the best reproduction of photos, the Microtek X6 just pips the Epson to the post. But for the best definition and focus for reproducing text and line art, the GT-7000 walks away with the honours. If you could do with a SCSI interface, or are thinking about getting a web design package, then there is no question that this is the scanner for you.

Author: - David Fearon