adamadi's Full Review: Canon CanoScan FB620P Flatbed Scanner
I needed a scanner, not to do any professional work, just to scan some pictures. I didn’t have much money to spend. I was lucky to find this scanner for $35 in a closeout sale.
Paying $35, my expectations were rather low. The scanner comes with a slim manual, sufficient enough. A CD is included packed with the scanner drivers, Scancraft CSP (Scanning Software), Scancraft Copy (Photocopying software), Adobe photodeluxe and Textribdge OCR software Lite edition. The scanner also came with its own cable and power adapter.
The scanner itself is rather small. It measures 36 1/2 cm Length x 26 ½ cm Width x 5 cm Height. Its nice and small and can fit well on a small desk. The scanner has two ports on the back, a male and female parallel port so you can connect another parallel port device through the scanner. (TIP: If you have a parallel zip drive, connect the Zip to the computer and connect the scanner to the zip, it’s the only way it will work) There is also a lock underneath the scanner which I suppose locks the LED bar into place during moving around e.t.c. This is a flatbed scanner, and is capable of scanning up to Legal size paper. The scanning process is LIDE which is a LED light bar which moves along the document.
Installing the scanner was rather simple. Connect the scanner to the computer, pop in the CD and press install. After that, you start up the scanning software and calibrate the scanner which takes just a couple of minutes. Then your ready to scan. Scanning is also quite simple. Flip open the lid, align the document on the glass panel, close the lid and press scan.
The software is rather easy to use. It has a preview function where it does an initial scan of the document. There, you can see if the document is aligned properly or not, or you can set up which part of the document you would like scanned or not. Example, if you were scanning a picture, you set it to scan only the picture not all the space around it. There are different modes of scanning, black and white, grayscale, 8-bit to 24bit colour. Scanning resolutions are 600 x 600 DPI Max.
Scanned documents look rather good for a $35 scanner. Colours look good enough, although they tend to be a bit dull. I found that the scanner works best with text in grayscale mode. But the pictures are still great, posting them on the web, no one will know you used a $35 scanner. Its only if you print out pictures that the graininess in the pictures show up more. You can save images in a variety of formats, from uncompressed TIF images to compressed JPEG images.
The other ScanCraft Copy software is easy to use. The program looks like the dial on a photocopying machine. Choose the amount of copies you want, the colours you want (Black and White, Grayscale or Full colour) and what printer to print on. Then just leave it to copy and print. Rather simple. The included image editing software, Adobe Photodeluxe is very basic. For people wanting to do simple touching up to pictures they have, its pretty decent, but for more advanced modifications, look elsewhere.
The OCR software is really a waste. Textbridge does make good OCR software, but the Lite version doesn’t work well. (OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. This is the capability of software to recognize text and treat it like text so you may be able to edit scanned documents in word or any word processor) The software failed to recognize most characters in a clear text document, if you really want OCR, you should get the full version of this software.
In conclusion, this scanner works pretty well. For $35, you really can’t go wrong. This is not a professional scanner by any means, its probably the cheapest scanner on the market. But its good enough for home users needing to do basic scans, I highly recommend this scanner for anyone on a budget.
High quality 600 x 600, 30-bit color scans One-touch scanning button Parallel port for easy connectivity State-of-the-art image sensor Great bundled s...More at Amazon Marketplace
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