Umax Astra 1220S review

Umax has an enviable reputation for making professional scanners at professional prices.

Their budget models have been a bit more hit-and-miss, but their last offering to grace these pages (the 610P) won a place in our Top 50 awards seciton. The 1220S ups the stakes, with SCSI connectivity (with a card included in the price), 600x1200dpi optical resolution and 36-bit colour sensitivity. These last two figures mean that the 1220S can see 720,000 dots per square inch, each with a possible 68,719,476,736 colours. Of course, that doesn't mean it always sees the right colours...

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 £129 retail price has gone, rather than on scanning technology.

Due to its rock-bottom price, this model shows distinct signs of cost-cutting in the area of manuals and documentation. The 1220S simply includes a fold-out sheet of instructions. Although it also provides more comprehensive on-screen manuals on its software CD-ROMs, this is nowhere near as convenient as having things down on paper. One thing that hasn't suffered from the tight budget is build quality - this scanner seems sturdy enough not to worry about.

While specs and software are interesting (except, of course, they're not), 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 to help show up problems with colour accuracy and so forth.

In the photographic test, even the cheapest scanners did well, but the Umax did have the edge on them, thanks to its high optical resolution. Against other 600x1200 machines, though, it proved to be nothing special. Similarly, the 1220S' results from the text test were far less blocky that on the low-res scanners, but its images suffered from a peculiar spidery quality, and its low contrast meant black text didn't stand out from the white background as well as it should have. Other 600dpi machines did a lot better.

While the Umax 1220S isn't by any means a bad machine, it's got nothing going for it to make it stand out from the crowd, other than a respected name. But when the image quality isn't quite up there with the rest, reputation just isn't enough to go on.

Author: - David Fearon