Umax Astra 1200s
MicroTek E6
In response to alot of questions that get asked in the scanner newsgroups I decided to organise this small page to compare the 'vanilla' outputs of these two worthy scanners...
What you see here is a 6x4 inch glossy photo scanned at 300DPI on both machines with the color balance etc set via the scanner drivers 'auto' settings...the images have then been rescaled to 800 pixels wide and converted to JPEG format, using Photoshop version 4.
Twain drivers used were UMAX MagicScan & MicroTek ScanWizard respectively... The image used was chosen because of the fact that it has alot of contrast and also some sharp edges that are useful when comparing focus.
I'm no expert by any means so if the terminology is incorrect or my ideas seem crasy, please forgive me :) ...
Umax Astra 1200s
MicroTek E6 |
The original image has some quite dark areas that neither scanner with default settings was able to resolve, although using the 'advanced functionality' of each scanner driver it is possible to fix this.
I own a 1200s so perhaps I am biased but the color rendition of the 1200s image is very close to the original - with only the lack of detail in the dark areas letting it down. To be honest this suprised me considering I used default settings. As a side note, using 'MagicMatch' with this image totally over saturated the colors giving a sickly look to the image - shadow detail was not improved. MagicMatch can do wonders with some images so its best to do a number of scans with different settings and then decide which suits you best.
My preference?...Although the 1200s is much truer to the original photo color wise, for some reason I find the E6 image much more pleasing to the eye - I guess color is highly subjective!
The focus of the E6 is better I think (as is the shadow detail) although the difference is minimal...interesting considering that many reviews mention the 'soft focus' of the UMAX machines.
All up, the images are both very good - any differences can be easily eliminated by playing about with color balance and curves in Photoshop or similar application. Of course, there is nothing like getting the twain software to do the work for you here - both packages are highly configureable in this regard and the results are worth the effort to learn them!
So what do you think?... Comments to Colin Williams
If anyone out there is unhappy with comparing 'lossy' JPEG images, I have made the original images in TIF format available as a ZIP archive. Click here to download it (2.77 Mb in size!)