CNET editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Excellent
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 09/03/2001
Rather than producing a smorgasbord of features and functions, Epson seems to have homed right in on its target with a combination of simplicity, quality scans, and a reasonable price. While the Epson Perfection 1250 package doesn't provide a lot of software, the fundamentals are solid; it scans relatively quickly, crisply, and accurately. The Perfection 1250 is the only model in this roundup that's PC and Mac compatible. At $129, it's a bit pricier than the Umax Astra 4400 and the Acer S2W 5300U, but a $30 mail-in rebate helps make it more competitive. That, in addition to its good documentation and superior scan quality, makes the Epson the best value of the three.Rather than producing a smorgasbord of features and functions, Epson seems to have homed right in on its target with a combination of simplicity, quality scans, and a reasonable price. While the Epson Perfection 1250 package doesn't provide a lot of software, the fundamentals are solid; it scans relatively quickly, crisply, and accurately. The Perfection 1250 is the only model in this roundup that's PC and Mac compatible. At $129, it's a bit pricier than the Umax Astra 4400 and the Acer S2W 5300U, but a $30 mail-in rebate helps make it more competitive. That, in addition to its good documentation and superior scan quality, makes the Epson the best value of the three.
Simple charm
Right out of the box, the Epson's simple, blue-and-gray design makes it look more like a scanning tool than a scanning toy, and it offers useful, rather than entertaining, features. The scanner's lid rises on its hinges for thicker documents and comes off completely when necessary. The four control-panel buttons can send a scan directly to your printer or wake up your computer to pop an image into e-mail or Epson's PhotoCenter Web site; the fourth button launches Epson's driver. Epson provides a USB cable with the Perfection 1250, and the scanner itself is compatible with Windows 98, Me, and 2000, plus Mac OS 8.5 and 9.x. Its printed documentation covers the basics of setting up and operating the scanner. For learning all the ins and outs, you can read the excellent manual on the software CD.
We liked the 1250's performance in CNET Labs' tests. It chugged through a color scan in 30 seconds, about three-fourths the time that the Acer S2W 5300 and the Umax Astra 4400 took. The Epson took 32 seconds for a grayscale scan, about the same as the Umax and a tad faster than the Acer. And the scanner jury was enthusiastic about the 1250's capture quality. Colors were accurate and saturated, and the image showed palpable detail and perfect focus. The grayscale image was good but not perfect; while the jury commended the Perfection 1250's ability to capture subtleties in shading and detail, it also noted that the scanner added noise to the image by detecting shaded pixels in a completely white area of the test target.
Software oversimplified?
Epson doesn't include the Acer's depth of software, and some of the bundled programs have limited functionality. ArcSoft's PhotoImpression 3.0 is a creditable photo editor with scads of templates and goofy layouts. Unlike many photo editors, with their hideous special effects, PhotoImpression allows for attractive and interesting image manipulation, such as solarization and outlining. But Epson packages a severely crippled version of its own Film Factory 1.0 Lite archiving utility in a bid to persuade you to buy an upgrade; for example, it limits the number of archives you can create and doesn't support TIFF files.
Epson's SmartPanel driver is straightforward and easy to use, but it too has its limitations and annoyances. Its buttons let you take on various types of scanning tasks, such as making copies or scanning to a file, and a preview window lets you tweak different settings before scanning. But after the scan, a second window called Verify Assistant pops open, adding another settings-tweaking step to the process. And Epson doesn't offer a separate OCR application; you can scan to OCR from within SmartPanel only. Continue reading
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