by Al Massey
I am constantly being bombarded with “stuff” that doesn’t work, or doesn’t work as advertised. So when I get something from a company that works great right out of the box it turns into a red letter day. Acer Peripherals is rapidly becoming a favorite vendor of mine. Last month I took a look at the AcerView monitor and this month the AcerScan Prisa 610S scanner. The 610S is a SCSI model and, although you can get the 610P parallel port model for $30 or $40 less I suggest you get the SCSI model, its just plain faster for one thing.
Perhaps it’s the aviator in me, I don’t know, but I am naturally drawn to equipment that is elegantly designed and logically laid out. I don’t want to go on safari to find controls, switches and manuals, I want them placed where I can find them, often in my sleep. Its obvious the start that Acer had the user in mind when they designed the AcerScan. Design, quality, and affordable price make a great package. For example, I did not want to use the SCSI card included with the package. I already had a SCSI card in my system so all I had to do was set the ID on the scanner (it’s right there is plain sight) and plug it in, everything workd fine and I was up and running in five minuets.
With the introduction of the AcerScan Prisa 610S/P Acer Peripherals has brought high performance and affordability within reach of most users. This is a 600dpi-flatbed scanner offering 30-bit color for a representation of over 1 billion colors. Furthermore it provides an optical resolution of 600x1200, which can thus be interpolated to offer 9600x 9600 maximum resolution. This is not only good enough for most scanning projects, including the Web, but it can even make your great aunt Ida look good.
One of the impressive characteristics of the current crop of scanners has been speed and Acer certainly doesn’t disappoint the user here either. It offers a preview of the scanned image in around 6 seconds making it one of the speediest flatbeds on the market. I also found Acer’s “auto density” feature worthy of note. Auto density automagically adjusts the scanned image to its optimal brightness and contrast, enhancing the overall image quality. All this combined with one of the quietest scanners on the market make a great bundle the home office.
Further speeding up the process is Acer’s TWAIN compliant MiraScan Driver. MiraScan provides a wide range of functions that both enhance the overall quality of the image but measurably speeds up the process. Other user-friendly features include “zoom” for previewing a specific part of the scanned image, a “descreening” tool which eliminates Moire patterns automatically during the scan process and, the “true color” feature.One more useful feature is the status bar which displays the current image size in MB’s and also allows you to measure the image dimensions in inches, centimeters and pixels.
But one of the most admirable features for me was the HTML manual that is easy to read in your Web Browser and allows you to get the latest Driver updates from their Web site with the click of a mouse. This makes it really easy to find information online with having to look up the manual.
The AcerScan comes bundled with TextBridge from Xerox and Uleads iPhoto so you can start scanning and editing your images immediately. TextBridge is an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) package offering a simple interface and one of the more impressive character recognition engines on the market. With TextBridge you can quickly and accurately convert scanned documents into editable format.
Ulead’s iPhoto Plus is a photo imaging package that will give you hours of great fun. It allows you to express yourself creatively while touching up your scanned photos.
Al Massey is a HAL-PC member who can be reached at almas@hal-pc.org.