Some people are perfectly happy with 8.5x11" scanners (or A4 format, if you prefer). Sure, stick with your HP scanners, your UMAXen, your Epsons.

I wanted something larger. I wasn't looking for monstrous, I just wanted to be able to scan up to A3 (300x420mm, or 11.8x16.5") format, and wanted a transparency attachment. I wanted a scanner from a company with a good reputation, and I wanted to get it cheaply.

Enter my friend, Mandi, who had picked up an AGFA Horizon for a song at an auction, and was hoping to sell it to finance her honeymoon and possibly some scuba lessons. She was willing to take installment payments, and I got a perfectly good used Horizon for a rather better price than what it would have cost me new (I paid $5K, and it cost $16-17K new).

I already knew the capabilities of the Horizon, having used it in printing operations before, and was always impressed with its quality and consistency. And I'm still delighted. The thing is massive---it weighs around 100 pounds, and you could use it as a coffee table---but that weight helps add consistency to the results. The transparency attachment that came with this model works beautifully. And I firmly believe that the AGFA Horizon has one of the finest optics boxes ever produced for a flatbed scanner.

It's not perfect. It's a three-pass scanner (one pass for each of the colors red, green and blue), so it's slow, but the FotoLook software (I'm using the MacOS version) used to acquire the scans allows you to preview in greyscale if you like. The scanner uses a SCSI-1 interface, and AGFA no longer supports the software in the latest versions of FotoLook, but they also show no signs of removing the older versions of FotoLook, and they still appear committed to keeping these beasts happy with updates to the older software, which works just fine with MacOS 8.6 on a 400MHz G3 minitower.

Eventually, of course, I'll be able to afford a more up-to-date model, but if you have a chance to pick up a cheap Horizon somewhere, and find a few friends to lug it to where your computer is, you won't be disappointed. In spite of its bulk and age, I'm delighted with my purchase. I'm particularly enamored of the transparency attachment, since the contrast ratio you get when scanning slides is around 100:1 compared to that of scanning prints. And while the three-pass scan cycle takes a little longer than your average one-pass UMAX scanner, you're gonna be hard pressed to scan eight 4x6 prints at once on a SuperVista---so if you have a large number of prints you need to scan, it might wind up actually saving you time.





Recommended: No