Microtek ScanMaker X6 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 Microtek ScanMaker X6 is one of the more expensive models we tested, coming in at £164 on the street (the cheapest one was only £58). However, the X6 has an impressive 600x1,200 optical resolution, which means it can see 720,000 dots per square inch, and 36-bit colour sensitivity, equating to a completely over the top 69 thousand million colours. It's also built like a tank, with a solid metal chassis and very sturdy plastic outer casing.

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.

While most SCSI scanners come with a SCSI card to plug inside your computer, the X6 doesn't. Fine if you've got one already (you certainly don't want two). Otherwise, you'll need at least another £50 in your budget to get one. SCSI is faster than the traditional parallel port connection, but most scanning speeds are dictated by the scanner itself, not the connection. So don't expect super-fast scans; they still take about 2 minutes for an A4 page.

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 this, you'll be wanting some software, and Microtek happily obliges, bundling Ulead iPhoto Express and Caere OmniPage LE. iPhoto lets you edit and re-touch photos as well as create greetings cards, calendars and so on, and OmniPage is a capable, if basic, OCR 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 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).

It was in the photo test that the X6 justified its price. All the units in the £150 price area were slightly better than the cheaper models, but the Microtek came out top by virtue of its slightly more natural colour balance and its ability to show extremely subtle differences in shade.

When scanning black text at maximum resolution, the differences between different machines were more pronounced. Again the Microtek retained its place in the top league, but its contrast was just a little low, so text was a little grey.

If you need a 600dpi scanner, you'll have to pay over £100 - but you then get a choice of excellent performers. If you're planning to enlarge your favourite photos, to A4 say, Microtek's ScanMaker X6 with it's superb colour definition will give the best results. You'll need to bear in mind, though, that it doesn't come with a SCSI card, and that'll add another fifty quid to the £139 (£163) street price if you're not already appropriately kitted out.

Author: - David Fearon