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ZD Article on New Product
Logitech PageScan USB
The Easiest Scan in Town
The first thing we noticed when we opened Logitech's $229 PageScan USB's box was that there really wasn't much to unpack--no power brick, no parallel pass-through gizmo, no SCSI card or cable. There was just a 3.5-inch-tall sheet-fed scanner with a USB cable and a CD-ROM of software that includes Adobe's PhotoDeluxe and, for OCR, Xerox's TextBridge.
Plug one USB cable into the back of your PC, and Logitech's PageScan USB is ready to start spitting out good-looking color scans.
We plugged the beta PageScan USB's lone cable into the USB port on our CyberMax Cyrix testbed. Win 95 recognized the scanner and prompted us for the driver disk. (You'll need OSR2 and the USB supplement.) About 30 seconds later, we pressed the button on the side of the scanner and began scanning a variety of materials, including laser-printed documents, cards printed on card stock, photographs, and magazine pages.
The color contact image sensing (CIS) technology, which makes possible such a small, low-power scanner, does a reasonable job and is more than acceptable for scanning documents to be run through OCR software. We found the PageScan's color definition adequate for bright colors, though the scanner produced some line patterns and artifacts that made the dark colors in our tests look dithered. Logitech is confident this problem will be fixed in the shipping version.
Like most sheet-fed scanners, the Logitech PageScan won't cut it in a serious graphic production environment, but it produces colors better than any other scanner near its price range. The box might look bare, but the product offers the easiest install of any scanner we've tested. --Daniel B. Levine
About...Logitech PageScan USB
PROS: Simple installation; doesn't require SCSI or a printer port.
CONS: Dark colors look dithered.
Logitech's PageScan USB offers the simplest setup yet and decent scan quality to boot.
COMPANY: Logitech, Inc., Fremont, CA
PRICE: $229
AVAILABILITY: Now
OS SUPPORT: Win 95 (OSR2.1)
PHONE: 800-732-3039
URL: www.logitech.com
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