AcerScan Prisa 620U

I have been an avid user of image scanners for many years now, my first "serious" scanner was a Microtek 600Z that cost me close to $1400. It was a three pass, 300dpi flatbed scanner that used a proprietary parallel port interface card. It did a good job but was very slow. Today's image scanners are incredibly fast, feature high-resolution, simple host interfaces and are very reasonably priced.

The AcerScan Prisa 620U is an excellent choice for anyone who is thinking about buying a high-quality, flatbed image scanner. It's optical resolution is 600dpi with a color depth of 36 bits and features a USB interface. Anyone with Windows 95 OSR release 2 (aka Windows 95B) or Windows 98 that has USB ports should consider putting them to good use. Most of today's most popular selling scanners use the parallel printer port, they offer easy installation but often interfere with the operation of printer and certainly does not offer the data transfer speed of the newer USB ports.

Installation was easy, you install the software first and then simply plug in the USB cable and Windows identifies the hardware and loads the appropriate driver. It took me longer to take the scanner out of the box than it did to actually install it. Once I finished the installation I brought up ThumbsPlus and used the TWAIN acquire option to talk to the scanner.

I was most impressed with the number of options and controls available in the MiraScan program furnished with scanner. It has all the usual features for setting the resolution, scanning mode and such but also offers a myriad of advanced features. Many scanners have a descreen option to allow you to scan pictures from printed materials such as magazines and catalogs that removes the moire pattern. The Acer's software allows you to choose several different descreen options such as newspaper (85lpi), magazine (133lpi), art magazine (175lpi) or to specify the custom setting from 50-200lpi.

A full-screen preview takes very little time, usually 5-10 seconds. There is no on/off switch on the scanner, it is software controlled. When the scanning interface is called into action it turns on the lamp automatically and after the scanner has been inactive for several minutes, it automatically turns it off again. An average 100dpi scan of a 8 by 10 color photograph takes only 20 seconds and the image is instantly transferred to your graphics application. Using the "auto density" feature I have had to do very little color or brightness corrections, it hits the nail on the head almost every time.

Besides the auto density feature it also has another setting called "photo magic" where it gives you various samples of the image using different settings of brightness, contrast, and color balance that can be selected by a simple mouse click. Other options include different levels of sharpness including a desharp mask as well as blurring. The scanning resolution can be set from 75 to 19200dpi, anything above 600dpi is achieved via software interpolation. I rarely ever scan anything at a resolution higher than 300dpi myself, and usually use 100 to 150dpi for color photographs.

The bottom-line is that this is an excellent image scanner at a very good price. It produces excellent images with very true to life colors, is incredibly fast and it's a snap to install and lots of fun to use. I would not hesitate to recommend this scanner to anyone, it's a winner in my book!

Steve's Digi-Rating

I give the AcerScan Prisa 6230U scanner a rating of 5 digicams, it operates flawlessly, installs easily, it's priced around $130-150 which is very reasonable for a 36-bit/600dpi scanner and it uses the ultrafast USB port.