Visioneer OneTouch 8920

Editors' note: We have updated the ratings of this product to reflect changes in this category. (5/3/04)

The first thing you'll notice about the Visioneer OneTouch 8920 is its unique design. While most scanners these days are as thin as a Triscuit and almost as fragile, Visioneer made the OneTouch 8920 thick as a stack of buckwheat flapjacks. The OneTouch 8920 is also inexpensive and versatile, with a built-in adapter for scanning slides and negatives, plus plenty of useful software. Unfortunately, the OneTouch 8920's scan quality is merely marginal.The first thing you'll notice about the Visioneer OneTouch 8920 is its unique design. While most scanners these days are as thin as a Triscuit and almost as fragile, Visioneer made the OneTouch 8920 thick as a stack of buckwheat flapjacks. The OneTouch 8920 is also inexpensive and versatile, with a built-in adapter for scanning slides and negatives, plus plenty of useful software. Unfortunately, the OneTouch 8920's scan quality is merely marginal.

Touching the OneTouch
Getting the $149 OneTouch 8920 working is a snap. It's compatible with PCs running Windows 98 and above (but not Macs, unfortunately) and includes its own USB cable. When you insert the included CD-ROM, an installer program loads ScanSoft's document-archiving program PaperPort Deluxe 7.0 and Visioneer's Scan Manager Pro control software. During the installation, the program tells you when to plug in the USB cable and power up, and you're ready to scan. You also get ScanSoft's TextBridge Pro 9.0 OCR program and Adobe's Photoshop Elements.

Using the OneTouch 8920 is ridiculously easy. Seven buttons line the chunky, gray box's front edge; several are programmed to send scans directly to e-mail, a fax/modem driver or printer, or the OCR software. You adjust scan settings with Scan Manager Pro, which we found rich in features yet blessedly easy to use. You can pick the resolution, tweak brightness and contrast, turn on AutoCrop to scan only to the edges of your document, select DeScreen to eliminate moiré patterns in printed images, and adjust the gamma to improve color-matching. Scan Manager Pro also lets you name and save a group of settings so that you can quickly restore them.

The OneTouch 8920's design is a mix of cleverness and compromise. For fat documents, such as books, the OneTouch 8920's lid slides up on its hinges or comes off completely. Switching to transparency mode to scan slides and film negatives doesn't require attaching any extra components, as on some other scanners. Instead, you unsnap a plastic protector inside the lid to expose the backlight, then plop a template on the glass. The slide template has an easy-to-use slot cut to hold one slide. The negative template is not quite so simple, however, because you have to thread the film through a groove that might introduce scratches. And the scanner has only an 8.5-by-11.7-inch (A4/letter) scanning bed, which is too small for businesses that want to scan legal documents.

OneTouch responds
In CNET Labs' tests, the OneTouch 8920 delivered blazingly fast speeds. It captured color images in 17.5 seconds and grayscale images in 12.5 seconds--much faster than comparable scanners, such as the $149 HP ScanJet 4400c and the $99 Canon CanoScan N670U. It captured slides in 33.4 seconds and negatives in 43.8 seconds. If you need high resolution and color depth, the OneTouch 8920 can grab images at rates up to 1,200x4,800dpi and send 48-bit color to your PC. Hide Review