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Bill Machrone
A hot new scanner is afoot--but do you need all that power?

Bill Machrone
Contributing Editor PC Magazine
Monday, April 16, 2001
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The Epson 1680 does everything a high-end scanner should--including costing a bunch of money. With all the $99 flatbed scanners out there, why the heck would you spend $1,400 on a scanner? Because you want excellent results, that's why.

If you're just scanning flat materials to put onto a Web site or drop a cute graphic into a report, save yourself a bundle, buy the $99 scanner, and go on to the next article. But if you are a graphic artist, photographer, or serious hobbyist, you owe it to yourself to read PC Magazine's review of the Epson Expression 1680 Pro FireWire.

Good scanning starts with resolution. The cheap scanners have limited mechanical resolution, but they interpolate like crazy to give an effective resolution that's much higher. You pay a price, however, in edge definition, speed, and other factors. Inexpensive scanners have limited color depth, too. Color depth takes lots of memory, quiet (free from optical noise) circuitry, and a fast processor to work through all those bits, just like a high-performance graphics card in reverse. Cheap scanners offload as much as they can to the processor in your computer, slowing things down by requiring significant postprocessing time. Good scanners do a lot more onboard before they send the image to your machine. High-end scanners are far more robust and faster mechanically, too.

The Epson Expression 1680 is all that and more. In addition to its built-in SCSI and USB interfaces, it also has FireWire (IEEE-1394), and even includes a FireWire card for your PC. Our reviewer, contributing editor David Stone, has seen it all when it comes to graphics, and he was suitably impressed by the 1680's performance. His review tells you why.

What's your take on high-end scanners? Do you need all that performance? TalkBack to me.

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