AcerScan 620U

This
is the latest offering from Acer in their existing range of 620 scanners. It’s
a flatbed, single-pass, CCD color scanner targeted at home and small office
users. Setting up this plug-n-play USB scanner was fast and easy. It comes
with a power adapter, USB cable, installation CD, and a good software
bundle. The manual is excellent, with detailed explanations. The scanner
supports both PCs and Macs.

AcerScan has an optical
resolution of 600x1,200 dpi. The quality of scanned output is pretty good.
It has options for high quality or high-speed scanning. It takes about 9-10
seconds to do a preview scan of an image. We scanned from various media
using the default settings of the scanner—300 dpi for color photographs,
150/300—dpi for grayscale images, and 300 dpi (minimum) for line art
images.

The time taken depends on
whether you’re scanning in high-quality or high-speed modes. The final
scan for a postcard-size color image takes about 23 seconds in high quality.
For a full-page image, it takes more than a minute. In high-speed mode
though, the time taken came down to just 48 seconds. We printed the output
on a HP Deskjet 890C color inkjet printer. Interestingly, there wasn’t too
much of a difference in the images that were scanned in high speed and high
quality.

Grayscale mode scanning works
much faster—taking only about 20 seconds for a full size image at 600 dpi.

The scanner comes with a good
software bundle. This includes Ulead Photo Express, which makes it fast and
easy to modify images and create calendars, screensavers, and greeting
cards. It also has TextBridge Classic OCR software from Xerox that converts
text images into ASCII text files. A copier software is also included.

Overall, the scanner gives
good quality output, and given the price and the software bundle, it makes a
good choice for home or office. It comes with a one-year warranty.