Review of:
UMAX Astra 610S Scanner 
by Dennis Stacy

 Here’s my recent experience with a UMAX Astra 610S, $129 after manufacturer’s $20 rebate. A single pass, page-size scanner, the 610S sports 30-bit color and 300 x 600 dpi optical resolution, with software interpolation of 4800 x 4800 dpi, though why the average user would ever need that many dots is beyond me. 

Another feature in the Astra’s favor is that it supports both Windows and Mac machines out of the box. I tested it on my wife’s Motorola Power Mac downstairs, so you’re experience (and mileage) may obviously be a little different. A SCSI card is provided for the PC crowd. On my wife’s Mac, I simply connected the scanner to the Zip drive. It turned out, though, that both the Zip and the Astra had the same factory SCSI setting. This was solved easily enough, however, by flipping a small switch in the back of the Zip, which changes the SCSI address from 5 to 6. 

 Software includes Adobe PhotoDeluxe, Presto! PageManager v.2.31, and VistaScan (v2.4), a TWAIN compliant driver. A UMAX copy utility turns the scanner and your printer into a serviceable copier, capable of enlargements up to 200%. And I’m not sure why this should necessarily ship with a scanner, but there’s also a CD offering a complete Internet set up and access kit, including Netscape Navigator 3.0 (Windows and Mac versions). 

 To initiate a scan, you place the object to be scanned on the transparent plate and then push the button on the front of the scanner. This automatically calls up the scanning software on the computer screen. From here you indicate the dpi you want, the type of art being scanned (line art, grayscale, or color) and you’re basically off to the races. First click Preview. The scanner makes that funny noise scanners makes and a picture appears on the screen of the scanned art, surrounded by dashed lines indicating the scanning zone. If you only want to scan part of a picture (say, to crop your mother-in-law out of the family reunion portrait), use the mouse to adjust the sides of the scan rectangle accordingly. 

 Or you can select VistaScan’s Auto option, and let the program do this sort of work for you. In fact, this was the only way I had any success when trying to OCR scanned text. 

 There are a couple of things not to like. First, the power switch itself is situated at the very bottom of the back of the case, and is very small to boot. I haven’t yet learned how to find it by feel, so I’m invariably forced to lean over and fumble around at the back of the case just to turn the thing on. Since the cover isn’t hinged, the scanner works best scanning only very, very flat things. Even a thin paperback causes the cover to stick up in the air at an angle, resulting in some light flare in the subsequent scan of the cover. Don’t expect to scan legal documents, either. The specs say the Astra has a scanning area of 8.5 x 11.7 inches, and I would take them at their word and then some. Although I could fit the cover of a slightly oversized English magazine on the plate, the scan still wouldn’t come out completely correct. 

 My first attempt to OCR text resulted in one of those Mac error messages, rivaled only in cryptic prose by the Windows platform: “Sorry, a system error occurred. ‘Presto! PageManager 2.31.01’ error type 11.” The machine froze up and had to be rebooted. 

 Eventually, I scanned in a two-column magazine article and then copied a three-column newspaper article, printed it out, and then scanned that. PageManager read both selections fairly well, although I don’t think it’s OCR engine will ever be mistaken for something as robust as a standalone OCR program like TextBridge. In fact, I would highly recommend something like the latter if you plan on much heavy-duty text importing. For example, while there may be one, I couldn’t find a way to add pages to a scanned document. If you wanted to OCR a five-page article, it appears you would have to scan and OCR each one in Presto! and then presumably cut and paste them into a single document or file. 

 I’ll continue poking around in this program and let you know if I come up with a solution. If there is one, I suspect it may lie in the Presto! PageManager’s Application Bar, to which you can add programs like your favorite word processor. The options on installation are E-mail, Fax, Printer and Simple Text. All of these operate by virtue of the easy drag and drop method. 

 In the end, the UMAX Astra 610S seems an affordable first or second scanner for the family computer, capable of handling both text and graphics with adequate enough aplomb. If OCR is a major concern or activity, however, you’ll definitely want a more robust text recognition program to round out the package.