Product Reviews

More than almost any other peripheral, the price of a decent scanner has plummeted over the last few years. Five years ago a colour flatbed would have cost around a grand, but now you can pick one up for ten times less. The reason for this is pretty simple: items like CPUs keep getting faster, so the manufacturers can keep charging lots of money for the increasing performance. However, there's not much you can add to a scanner once it has colour capability and around 300dpi (dots per inch) resolution, so prices just keep on tumbling.

In fact, this scanner comes with a quoted resolution of thousands of dpi, but that's just a marketing game and it can't really see that much detail. Given the price of this unit, we weren't expecting much beyond a couple of plastic boxes with glass on top, and that's pretty much what we got. The Paperport 3000 is slightly unusual though, in that the top hinges along the length of the case rather than the width. The unit is a parallel port device, plugging into the port on the back of the computer where a printer normally attaches, with a pass-through connector so you can continue to use the printer normally.

The scanner comes with a thin paper manual, covering the bare essentials - how to unwrap and plug it in, basically. As well as TWAIN-compatible drivers, which let you scan images straight into almost any application, it comes with

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a couple of apps of its own.

The Visioneer's software is quite unusual: it gives you a window that it calls the scanner desktop, with a bar along the bottom containing icons for the applications you already have installed, such as Microsoft Word. Once you've scanned an image, you can drag it to one of these icons and the software will try to intelligently convert it and import it into that application. For instance, dragging a page of scanned text onto Word will invoke the optical character recognition part of the program, and the image will be converted to text and opened in Word.

When testing this scanner with photos, I set the resolution to 300dpi. There's no point in going higher than this, since higher quoted resolutions are simply interpolated, meaning that the hardware literally guesses the additional pixels, not that it can actually see them. If you use the really high settings, all you'll get is an absolutely enormous scan with no actual increase in detail - a 6x4in photo scanned at 4,800dpi results in a 1.5Gb file!

When scanning colour photos, the Visioneer was less than perfect, with scans that were slightly grey. As far as picking up on fine detail goes, the quality was pretty good. Almost everyone who buys a scanner will want to scan loads of pictures of their family and friends, so reproduction of skin tones is important. The Visioneer didn't do brilliantly on this score, making peachy skin colours fairly dull, but the results were certainly very acceptable. Scanning speed was fine, with a full page of A4 taking just a couple of minutes to transfer.

If you're just looking for a way of getting your holiday snaps into electronic form or producing pics for your web site, there's really no reason to spend any more than the 100-odd quid this scanner will set you back. For the best image quality, other scanners may have the edge, but the PaperPort 3000's software is well integrated. For the money, it is a darned good buy.