The Astra 1200S A Reasonably Priced Scanner That Really Performs

Getting started with the Astra 1200S was simple, thanks to the easy to use instruction manual. Gladly the package came with a SCSI interface card which we installed in our Windows 95 test computer containing Adobe Photo Shop 4.0 to operate the scanner. Installing the card, scanner and bundled software took 15 minutes - "See Technical Support". Within 20 minutes we made a print of our first scan. The TWAIN-compatible scanning software included with the Astra 1200S allowed us to preview the image using manual or automatic settings, then allowed us to scan at the resolution of our choice - from 1 to 9600 dpi. We scanned a couple hundred images at all of the different settings and always found the software to be fast and accurate. Visually, the 30-bit scans of our images looked clean and extremely detailed with very little enhancement needed. Some images that we scanned were very large (12x24) and needed to be pieced together after scanning. We were able to scan up to 4 images and convert them into 1 image. See if you can tell which photos were pieced together! http://www.academyart.com/mdindex.htm we dare ya!

The Astra 1200S displayed decent scanning speed in all our tests; more than enough for the average office. We had good results scanning legal sized documents up to 11 X 14 inches; when converting them into text we found outstanding accuracy on documents printed on a 300 dpi on our HP ink jet printer.

An excellent value, the UMAX Astra 1200S is an easy, fast and reliable way to meet the scanning needs of the small to medium office. For less than $260.00.

Scanner Purchased
UMAX Astra 1200S
Adobe Photo Deluxe Software CD ROM
Purchase Price $246.99

Test Equipment
Windows 95
200 MHz Pentium
64 Megs Ram
512 Cache
Adobe Photo Shop 4.0
Web site developed with the Astra 1200S
The Official Marc Davis Collectors Society
http://www.academyart.com/mdindex.htm

Technical Support
*****
The one little problem that we had. We purchased our Astra 1200S at Fry’s Electronics in Woodland Hills California, on a Saturday at 11:00am, January 17^th. The package came with Version 6.2 and should have come with Version 8.2. We called UMAX technical support at 11:45am.; by 11:47am we had a tech. on the line - "ON SATURDAY OF A 3 DAY WEEKEND - Unheard of". The problem was diagnosed and the correct software was on it’s way by 12:00pm.

8:00am, Monday morning, "Martin Luther King Day", FedEx was at our office with the correct software.

Hurray For UMAX Technical Support.

For technical specifications visit UMAX at http://www.umax.com

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Last modified: November 08, 2002