An "Out-Of-The-Box-Experience" is not some sort of New Age phenomenon relating to a possible afterlife. It is a new marketing slogan for Acer's new line of peripherals. The intent is to make installation a pleasant, easy experience as opposed to some of the nightmares most of us have gone through. The heart of this concept is design simplicity coupled with an easy to follow, step-by-step, well illustrated poster that supplements the familiar manual. The ST notation following the model number (620) indicates that this model has a SCSI interface. Past experience would indicate that this is a sure-fire inherent complication, therefore a real challenge for the marketing slogan. Just how well did they do?

The installation poster is quite large, colorful and on the surface leads you by the hand through each installation step, hardware first, then software. The illustrations show what is to be done at each step, using actual hardware photographs and an easy to follow text. There is no need to consult your guru or a technical dictionary to divine the meaning of the descriptive wording. Amazing, plain English in an installation document! But will it work?

Before we get to the actual installation experience, let us cite some of the features of this scanner. It comes in 3 flavors, parallel, SCSI and USB interfaces. The ability to scan transparencies, both positive and negative is inherent in the unit. Of course, it is fully TWAIN compatible. There are two power supplies, one for the main scanner and one for the transparency feature. A PCI SCSI adapter and SCSI cable are included as well as masks to place on the scanner glass when scanning transparencies. The transparency scan glass has a readily removable protective cover to keep it scratch-free during normal scanning.

Step 1 on the installation poster is a photo of all the included parts and the text advises you to locate and identify each. They were all there.

Step 2 shows a pair of hands inserting the SCSI adapter card into a PCI slot. The text tells you how to install the card. The first thing I noticed that the SCSI connector was a 25 pin SCSI-1 connector. There went my initial plan to connect it to my super-duper Adaptec card. So I installed the supplied, one function SCSI card. There were no jumpers or adjustments of any kind needed on the card, just plug it in and screw down the bracket. Truly design simplicity and ease of installation. The drawback, it takes up another expansion slot.

Step 3 included a photo of the connections between the scanner/power/computer and a descriptive text. That concluded the hardware installation, total time, less than 5 minutes. Step 4 is the software installation and the flip side of the poster shows exactly how, the correct order for doing things, how to make your first scan and even some operating tips.

So now I fired up the computer, placed the software CD in the drive and sure enough, Windows 98 recognized that new hardware was added and asked for permission to proceed with the driver installation. It installed the SCSI card driver almost instantly. I then went to the CD and installed the scanner driver, MiraScan. The next software item on the CD is Textbridge OCR. I selected this from the menu and the installation went flawlessly. The last piece of software that I installed was iPhoto Plus, a highly graphical, very versatile image manipulation and application tool. There is also Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 on the CD as well as an extensive html manual for the scanner.

For those somewhat hazy about scanner software, the scanner driver, MiraScan is the TWAIN interface as well as the tool that allows you to set up the scanning parameters. These include the type of material you are scanning, e.g., reflective or transparent, color/b&w, the scan quality and the various image parameters. There is a preview feature that gives you a fast scan so that you can crop the image before the final scan. TWAIN compliant means that it is addressable by TWAIN devices and systems. To scan an image, you open an application program such as iPhoto, Adobe Photoshop, or Paint Shop Pro. Then click FILE, ACQUIRE, SELECT SOURCE. A drop down menu appears showing all TWAIN sources on your machine. MiraScan is one of them and you highlight it and click OK. Then click FILE, ACQUIRE, IMAGE and the ACQUIRE IMAGE drop down menu appears. Select NEW IMAGE in the destination field, then click ACQUIRE. Now you have a set of boxes for the scanner parameters. Once these are selected, click PREVIEW and a low-resolution image appears. Crop if desired by placing and sizing the dashed line rectangle over the portion of the image that you wish scanned. Click SCAN and the image appears. Close or drop MiraScan to the taskbar and the image is on the application software. Here you may do all the editing, orienting and manipulation that you desire and then you can save the image in one of many graphic formats (bmp, jpg, tif, etc.) to any storage location that you choose. You can also send it to the printer or to another application that accepts images.

The software installation process took less than 10 minutes including the reboots necessary for Windows 98. I then tried the procedure cited on a reflective picture and it worked just fine. So far so good, the marketing slogan is valid. The picture of the scanner included in this article was made from a 35-mm slide using the transparency scanner. As you can see, it worked. All said, I must conclude that the "Out-Of-Box-Experience" is absolutely true. I needed no special knowledge, just the instructions supplied with the package.

I tested the TWAIN compliance by using Adobe Photo DeLuxe, Business Edition, and Paint Shop Pro. Both interfaced properly with MiraScan and accessed the scanner as expected. Another plus for Acer, things actually worked the way they were supposed to. Of course, the iPhoto software also worked.

There was another CD-ROM included in the package, Kai's Photo Soap 2. This is a well known image enhancer.

The scanner itself is a 36-bit flatbed, capable of producing 68 billion colors (which I shall not list) with a 600 x 1200 dpi optical resolution and a 19200 x 19200 dpi interpolated resolution. You really don't want to store too many images of such high resolution. Oh yes, optical resolution is the inherent resolution ( x axis by y axis) of the scanner. The placement of the CCD's determine the x resolution and the stepping motor controller determines the y resolution. Interpolated resolution is the result of image enhancement and manipulation. The scanner has a built-in self-test feature that operates with power up. When the "ready light" is steady the unit is OK. There is also a power switch and an automatic timer that places the scanner in a "sleep" mode if it is not used for 30 minutes.

The iPhoto software has some neat features. There are many templates for creating end products such as business cards, greeting cards, calendars, posters and many more. You may also use the scanner as a copy machine by just clicking on the COPIER icon. The software has the capability of leading you through a project in a step-by-step method, or you can use the Quick Task icon to just go ahead and do the job. Context sensitive help is available for all screens. There is even a video tour to give you an overview of the program capabilities.

The Textbridge OCR is a Xerox product and is a very capable text reader. It can transfer scanned documents directly into many of the popular word processors and spread sheet applications.

The suggested list price for the parallel port version of the scanner is $149 and $169 for the SCSI version. If you factor in the cost of the software alone, (Textbridge, iPhoto, Photo Soap) you will see that this is quite a bargain package. Additional information and free driver updates are available at the web site www.acerperipherals.com.

The bottom line is that ACER has met the marketing slogan, and this is a fully capable package at a very reasonable price.




Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 169
Interface: SCSI