Umax Astra 4000U review

Photo processing used to be the domain of professionals.

Just a few years ago, the only way to get your holiday snaps printed was to take them to Boots. If you wanted anything fancy done, you paid a specialist.

Nowadays you can remove that red-eye yourself, or cut out that stranger crowding your romantic vista - just stick your pics on your own PC. A scanner is still the cheapest way to do this, even though digital cameras are coming down in price. The best quality scanners can now be had for under £100 - you only have to look at our last scanner group test (February 2000 issue).

So why would you ever pay over £200 for one? What does the extra cash get you, and is it worth it? In the case of the Umax 4000U, it was hard to tell at first. On the surface it looks like most other PC equipment: it's a large, rather flimsy beige box that connects to the PC via its USB (universal serial bus) port. But despite its size, it only has 6cm more scanning area than our current pick of the pack, the compact Agfa 1212u.

But take a close look at the spec, and you'll see what's special. The extra cash buys you double the optical resolution. That means that instead of the more usual 600x600dpi or 600x1,200dpi ('dots per inch') most scanners boasts, the Umax 4000U is capable of capturing twice the number of pixels per inch. Our tests confirmed that this translates to an extremely high level of detail; far better than the Agfa 1212u. This will prove useful if you want to greatly enlarge images.

All very impressive, but scanning at such high resolutions also has its downsides. First of all, it impacts on how quickly scans are completed. At maximum settings, for instance, the 4000U took a full five and a half minutes to scan a small, standard 6x4in holiday snap; the same picture took just over a minute at 600dpi, which would be quite detailed enough for most purposes. To compound this, the disk space a 1,200dpi scan takes up is prohibitive (a whopping 127Mb for the above snap). Unless you have 128Mb or more RAM to spare, manipulating it will prove impracticably slow.

The extra dough you're spending also buys you a better-than-average software bundle. As well as the usual complement of basic document management and OCR (optical character recognition) software, Umax has thrown in a copy of Adobe Photoshop 5 LE. But beware, although this is an extremely powerful image editing package, it's not the easiest for novices to get their heads around.

Fortunately, the scanner's control software is a little simpler to operate, and allows you to choose between a straightforward Basic mode, or an Advanced one that allows more control over images. It's still not quite as easy to use as HP's or Agfa's software, though.

So is it really worth spending over £200 on this scanner? Despite its extremely good image quality, we'd have to say no. At the end of the day, the advantages of the extra resolution will only be seen if you're planning on scanning transparencies (using the £149 transparency add-on), and enlarging them a lot. And even if this is the case, the 4000U's sheer cost would make me think twice.

Author: - Jonathan Bray