Easy and capable
Written: Sep 03 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: The scans
Cons: Flimsy lid and so-so software bundle
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| iann's Full Review: Epson Perfection 1200U Flatbed Scanner |
Perfection 1200U is a name that raises expectations in a purchaser's mind. If it is merely very good people will be disappointed. Well I'm here to say that the Epson Perfection 1200U scanner is not perfection, but it is better than very good.
This scanner is advertised as 1200x2400 meaning a real non-interpolated resolution of 1200dpi in one direction (widthways) and 2400dpi in the other (along the length of the scan). This is way more than most people will ever need. 100dpi is about right for scanning a picture for a web page and 300dpi for something to be printed. If you want a really good quality print, such as some of the photos I print on my Epson Stylus Photo 870, then you might use as much as 600dpi. Anything more just makes the image bigger, but you won't get any more detail out of it.
The scan bed is large enough for A4 or letter, but no more. The back has connections for power, USB, and "option" which I think is for things like the slide adapter kit. The front has a power switch and a button that can be used for one-push scans or copies. The lid is a flimsy thing, but it sits snugly enough over the scan bed. So it seems like the hardware has everything you need to make great scans.
The heart of any scanner is the driver software. This turns all that reflected light into a digital image for your computer, and for most people at least, performs all the enhancements that are necessary on a raw scanned image. The Perfection 1200U does this with a TWAIN standard interface which gives the user a lot of control over the eventual output. This is the primary reason I chose this scanner over any other - the scanner gives excellent control over things like unsharp masking and histogram settings. Many scanners claim these things but only offer some useless approximation, and many scanners have no control over the most useful enhancements. It is critical to enhance the image using the driver software because it can work on the raw scan and output a full dynamic range of colour. From that point onwards, you can play with the image as much as you want, but there is only a certain amount of information there. Epson has written a driver that is so good that I rarely even use most of the advanced controls because the driver picks the correct settings as the defaults.
Scanners almost always come bundled with programs and utilities and this is no exception. You get Textbridge's OCR program which is OK, but not great and several others like Photo Deluxe which I didn't even install. They are all OK for most home users, but not OK for anything more. There are a few little utilities such as the photocopier, which takes a scan directly to your printer for an instant copy. Its surprising how often that is useful in a home office. Still, I usually take the image into a graphics program and work it from there. That's just the control freak that I am. Your bundle may differ slightly but you'll get the same mix of shareware and out-of-date programs just good enough to make you want to buy the real thing.
I've already said that the images are excellent. If you have a printer that is up to the job you can scan and print photos that look just like the real thing, at least to the naked eye. Black and white scans tend to have a little too much detail, so that plain text often gets adorned with every single mark or crease on the paper. I guess the scan can only ever be as good as the original, warts and all. The scan speed will be a revelation to many people. I don't know if this is the USB interface, the scanner itself, or both, but it is fast. A pre-scan of the bed comes up in the TWAIN driver dialog almost as fast as the dialog itself. The scan takes a few seconds most of the time, a couple of minutes only if you crank everything up to the limit, and you probably won't have enough disk space for the image you get.
So who should buy this scanner? For home office use including a low-volume copier, it works great but its talents are really wasted. It is also more than you need to scan for your web page, although it certainly makes that job a pleasure and the pictures a dream. The only task which really needs this kind of perfection is high-resolution scans which are to be printed. This is a demanding task which only a few scanners do a good job on and this is the best I have seen in the budget price range.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
iann
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Member: Ian Nartowicz
Location: Falls Church VA
Reviews written: 62
Trusted by: 55 members
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