This was a difficult one!, we requested scanners for £200.00 plus VAT. Devcom sent us a scanner costing £59.00 Plus VAT! Are we complaining? No! not at all, except to compare it with the other scanners in the labs costing between £150.00- £220.00 is rather unbalanced we thought, but our curiosity got the better of us..
The Black Widow came with a Parallel port and corresponding cable, both USB and SCSI are optional, installing the scanner was relatively easy, once the cable was connected, and the drivers loaded the scanner was recognized almost immediately.

When a scanner is offered at such a good value as the Black Widow is, you would expect some cost cutting, in this instance it takes the form of no printed user manual. It may not worry the experienced amongst you, but for the beginner an on-line guide is provided assisting you to familiarize yourself with your newly acquired peripheral. The on-line guide is nothing to write home about, but it does cover the basics. The Black Widow is also supplied with a very basic slightly lager than A4 installation sheet to get you up and running.

As far as software bundles go, there is a reasonable offering. Presto! provides the complete bundle with Pagefile, Wordlinx, Bizcard, Photoalbum, Pagemanager SE, and ImageFilo LE. All of these are of decent quality and will meet the basic needs to ensure photo imaging, filing and all your OCR requirements are met.

Ergonomically the Black Widow does not share the sleek attributes of it's Lab companions, it is however compact enough to sneak away, and merely obey any commands given to it, having tested it for a further 5 days in our labs to ensure reliability the Black Widow did not let us down. The transportation lock uses a switch mechanism to unlock, similar to the Umax, no need to ensure you have a coin type tool handy.

In our preview test the Black Widow kept reasonably on par with the others, except for the Epson, and actually excelled over the Umax. The final scan times painted a different story, it was the slowest of the bunch. The quality of the photo was acceptable for a scanner considering the price tag.

The Black Widow 9636 is worth it's weight in gold. If you are purchasing a scanner as a mere experiment then buy the Black Widow, make excellent use of it, and dispense with it, when you want to. Considering it cost £60.00 for 1 adult and 2 children to see Watford play at home, miss a game and buy the Black Widow. Unanimously the labs team have voted the Value award to the Black Widow. Well done!.

Congratulations to Devcom on winning our One2surf Value Award!!

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