The scanner is small and light, and doesn’t try to be more than it is: A good, small no-frills basic color flatbed scanner.
The installation routine has an option for custom install, during which you can choose not to install the extra bundled software if you don’t want/need it.
At the end of the installation, it asks if you want to check online for newer drivers. I did so, and it found a newer driver (22 MB in size). I wish it had done that BEFORE installing the stuff from the CD, but it probably doesn’t make much difference either way.
Once the software was installed, Windows 7 64-bit found the scanner without fuss.
The scanner has some buttons on it, which I don’t intend to use, so I will leave their function to other reviewers.
The scan utility is pretty standard as scanners go, which is good. It does not bog you down with stylized frames around the windows and animations. It just brings up a rectangular dialog box with some options on it. The default setting is “full auto mode” which I suppose is good for non-technical people.
In addition to “full auto mode” you can switch it to “home mode”, “office mode” or “professional mode”, which have different settings and abilities relevant to each of those profiles. Home mode is more centered around what the image is going to look like. Office mode is more centered around how fast it will scan and what options will be applied to it. Professional mode is full of all kinds of interesting dials and knobs that you can twiddle to apply effects while scanning to get it just right. People who like to fiddle will have a field day with Professional mode.
Once you’ve chosen a mode, the process is pretty straightforward. Do a preview scan to find your image on the glass, select the area you want to scan, rotate/crop it, maybe fiddle a little more, choose what resolution and file type to use, and then scan it.
I would like to complain about one small but very annoying (to me) detail:
The software remembers that when I am in “Home” mode I want to scan at 300 DPI, and when I am in “Office” mode, I want to scan at 150 DPI.
However, the software does NOT remember that I want to save as JPG in Home mode and PDF in Office mode.
Seriously? How difficult is that? Can you really have missed that? Is it a “corner case”? Nobody would ever want to do THAT…
When I called tech support, the representative who barely spoke English told me that it was by design, so that you can get exactly what you want each time. Care for some SPIN, anyone?
If he had told me that it was a known issue, and they intended to fix it in an upcoming driver release, that would have been acceptable.
But no, they played it like it’s supposed to be that way, and it’s annoying.
I suppose that if this is the biggest complaint I can come up with, it’s a pretty good scanner and software package.
