Introduction
Who would have believed flatbed colour scanners could end up costing less than £150.00. Better still, it's possible to buy a perfectly respectable model from £49.00. The Market is awash with scanners with differing specifications and price tags, should it be USB, SCSI or Parallel. What resolution is best for general use?. It's not an easy decision to make. In our scanners labs we've put five flatbed scanners from respectable manufacturers through their paces. Our Labs criteria for the manufacturers was to provide us with A4 Flatbed Colour scanners costing no more than £200.00 plus VAT.

As far as specifications go the most confusing issue is that of resolution. This is a common misunderstanding that a higher resolution results in a better quality output. This has led to Manufacturers making exaggerated claims about the capability of their respective scanners. These claims are based on a technology called interpolation. What really matters is the optical resolution of the scanner, which can be anything between 300-1200dpi. Scanned images are made of dots (pixels) and if you zoom far enough into the image you will be able to view these 'dots' with jagged edges, interpolation attempts to smooth these over.

Imagine receiving a 20 page document, which you would desperately like to edit, change and send back to the author?. Traditionally you would have to re-type the complete document and make the necessary changes needed. However, with a scanner you simply scan the pages and edit the changes in your favorite word processor. The children who have a project or some graphical based homework to do will get a great deal of use from a scanner. The photographer in the family can scan his or her photos to create thumbnail catalogues or create a pictorial database attaching important information about the photograph. A scanner will end up being one of the most useful and versatile peripherals you've ever bought.

How we carried out our tests

We were determined to push all scanners to the limit. We selected a fine art image (See Figure 1) that measured 6" wide and 8" high at a resolution of 1,200dpi in 24-bit colour. Each scanner was used to scan this image and a record taken of the time to scan, and the file size created. You would not normally use this specification as the resulting file size can be in excess of 35Mbs. However, using this method resulted in a wide range of scanning times. The results are very interesting reading (see figure 2). The image was then printed to the HP930C and compared to the original photo for quality and size printed.

Figure 2 - Test Results

The test results are shown in minutes and seconds