Umax Astra 2000P Flatbed Scanner

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This scanner connects to your PC's parallel port for quick and easy setup with almost any Windows-compatible computer. Paired with a well-designed driver and a complete software bundle for editing and managing your images, Umax's Astra 2000P offers hassle-free scanning.

To set up the Astra 2000P, we followed the instructions in the quick start guide. We connected the parallel cable from our PC to the scanner and then connected our parallel printer to the scanner. We plugged in the AC power and installed the software from the CD-ROM. The software installation process was mostly automated, installing several applications consecutively. In our case, installation of the last application (OmniPage OCR) failed, requiring us to install it manually--a process that turned out to be quite tedious.

We tested the Astra 2000P by starting an imaging application and scanning a magazine photo. The Umax VistaScan driver software started automatically and, after a short delay while the lamp warmed up, showed us a preview scan. (VistaScan consistently waited for the scanner's lamp to warm up even after the lamp was already warm.) VistaScan has Beginner and Advanced buttons at the top of its window; the Beginner screen includes icons for color photos, printed material, text, line art, and Web images. We selected the working area on our preview scan and clicked the Color Photo icon for a final 300-dpi scan. VistaScan automatically exported the image to our graphics application. The image had an unsightly moir

Umax Astra 2000P Flatbed Scanner