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Umax AstraSlim

By Ian Cunningham

Umax have designed what can arguably be one of the thinnest scanners on the market today, only 34mm thick! What is surprising about this scanner is that it is one of the cheapest A4 scanners available, and it is totally USB powered - which is a very uncommon occurrence.



Scanner Dimensions

The scanner weights in at 2.3kg making it an ultra-portable solution, as well as having a trendy colour scheme of a silver/grey base and a deep blue lid. The reason the scanner is so compact and low powered is because it uses a CIS imaging scanner (Contact Image Sensors). This method of scanning uses an array of sensors located very close to the document surface, and feeds the image straight to the PC for processing, this eliminates the need for the lens, mirrors and CCD chip. The disadvantage of this process is that resolution, clarity and colour fidelity will all be sacrificed.

The build quality of the AstraSlim is as you would expect from a reputable company, very good. The scanner comes with a 2 year warranty, as is standard with all Umax scanners.

Specification:

  • Optical Resolution : 600x1200dpi
  • Interpolated Resolution : 3600x3600dpi
  • Colour Depth : 48 Bit
  • Greyscale Depth : 12Bit
  • Maximum Scan Area : 216x297mm
  • Interface : USB
  • Weight : 2.3kg
  • Power : 2.5W

    Minimum Requirements:

  • Pentium 200Mhz + CPU
  • Microsoft Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
  • 32 MB RAM
  • USB Port
  • 200 MB Available disk space

    This scanner was testing on a PC (Duron 750, 128 MB RAM and Windows XP) and a Laptop (P266MMX, 64 MB Ram, Windows XP) and it installed and functioned perfectly in both cases.

    I strongly recommend having at least 64 MB RAM and 500 MB free disk space (more memory would help a lot!), as image processing can cause huge temporary files, as well as consuming all available memory. Even with 128 Megs of RAM my system will crawl when manipulating images, especially when multiple images are open.

    Included Items:

  • AstraSlim Scanner
  • A to B USB Cable
  • Users Guide
  • Driver CD + OCR Software
  • Ulead PhotoExpress 3.0

    The scanner does not come jam packed with accessories, as it is a value scanner - although some additional software is bundled. The user guide was simply a folded sheet of A1 paper, with instructions in major languages. Although the scanner does not require much effort in the way of installation, it would have been nice to see a more substantial manual that could be kept for future reference (i.e with scanning tips, troubleshooting etc...)



    Included Bundle

    Installation

    Installation of the scanner is as simple as it gets:

  • Set scanner up into desired location
  • Plug USB cable into Scanner and PC
  • Wait for Windows to recognise new hardware, and then insert driver CD
  • Install autorun application suite to get advanced features

    I recommend downloading the latest drivers from Umax UK's support site to get the most out out of the scanner. They are not Windows XP certified, but I have had no problems with them so far - and they have been used frequently.

    The driver CD installs a piece of TWAIN compliant software that loads whenever you tell an application you wish to insert an image from the scanner. The interface is friendly, and ideal for someone who is a software novice - but lacks some features that other scanners have, as well as having a clunky interface.



    Scanning Software

    Performance

    The Hewlett-Packard 5P Scanjet will be used as a comparison model for the Umax scanner. The 5P is a high quality scanner, fast SCSI interface with good optics - but it is a few years old and would soon be replaced (the 5P costs 3 times as much as the AstraSlim).

  • Photographic Reproduction

    After digging out a holiday photo full of vibrant colours (150mm x 100mm), the scanning times of different resolutions were recorded, and a sample image produced from both:












    Umax AstraSlim









    Hewlett-Packard 5P

    The results from this photo were not as I was expecting at all, the Umax scanner gives a better representation as a whole than the 5P scanner does (at 150dpi). The HP 5P scanner lacks the definition of the AstraSlim, and the photo's colour balance is leaning too much towards the yellow. The AstraSlim provides much better detail of textures and edges (as can be seen by the rocks and plants), but seems a little too faded compared to the original. This was a huge surprise, as I was expecting the 5P to beat the AstraSlim in this test - as CCD scanning is superior in quality to CIS scanning.



    Another surprise was the identical scanning times for this photo at 150dpi, this is down to the extra few seconds the 5P scanner initially needs to get optimum brightness from the Cold Cathode tube. As you can see, the AstraSlim takes much longer to scan the photo at higher resolutions.

    The bundled OCR software "ReadIRIS" is a no frills solution, it's fast, but nowhere near as good as some of the other OCR products available (then again, these products will cost more than the scanner itself). After scanning a section from the supplied manual, it got most of the text correct, but with terrible formatting.

    Scanning a full A4 document in full colour at 600 dpi took 245 seconds, a lengthy time compared to the 46 seconds managed by the 5P scanner. The main bottleneck here will be the amount of data the USB transfer can handle - according to the scanning software the image size transferred was 102 MB. Obviously, if you are wanting to scan lots of high quality documents at high speed, this would not be suitable, and a SCSI scanner would be the solution.

    Conclusion

    The AstraSlim scanner certainly made a big impression at PC Review, it is ideal for home use and gives some impressive quality scans. The scanning time is slow, but this was to be expected from a completely USB powered solution. The CIS technology impressed us, and was a lot better than expected in comparison to the usual CCD - the fact that the scanner is only 34mm thick because of this was also a great feature.

    Business users would not be enticed by this scanner at all, as all its features that make it stand out are not necessary in that environment. This small, sleek scanner will slip in under a desk, and be "hot plugged" into a USB port whenever required, with no other setting up necessary. Cost, ease of use, and practicality have been the main design constraints when building this, and Umax have succeeded in their goal by creating one of the best budget scanners available.

    This scanner does an excellent job of any type of scanning thrown at it, but the software leaves something to be desired for more advanced users. If you are looking for a scanner that will be used a couple of times a week for enlarging photos, scanning books etc... then this is the best solution available - the small footprint of the scanner is ideal for discrete placement (and storage).

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