Umax Astra 4400 review

Umax has an enviable reputation in the high-end market, but its low-cost scanners have varied from great to not-so- great.

However, they often include desirable extras such as transparency units for scanning negatives and still keep the cost down. Here, the Umax's big selling point is an optical resolution of 1,200x2,400dpi, something we've not seen before from a scanner below £100. You'd need a very sharp image to take advantage of this top resolution, (300dpi is enough for most jobs), but it's still a handy feature. However, a high-resolution sensor is only useful if the lens is good enough to take advantage of it. In this case, scans are sharp, but in practice they are really no better than the detail provided by a good 600x1,200 sensor. This doesn't directly count against the Umax, but it goes to show that image quality is governed by many more factors than are revealed in the specification.

Umax requests that you install its software before attaching the USB cable, though as this is only mentioned in the manual, those eager to get the thing working will easily miss it. Aside from this issue, software is consistently above average, with the TWAIN software, image editor and OCR application all performing admirably.

Scans can be performed with manual or automatic control of contrast, brightness and hue, though, with the manual controls left at their default settings, the results were terribly dreary. Colours in the preview didn't always match the finished result, making manual settings virtually useless. Luckily, switching to auto improved matters greatly. Colours could have been slightly more vivid and tended to be a touch too red, but these faults were almost negligible.

The Umax is not without problems, but it's much better than most scanners at this price. However, it's biggest problem is that it hits the shops at the same time as Canon's N670U. Despite Canon's even lower price tag it trounces the Umax (and every other scanner we've seen) for quality and value.