Mustek BearPaw 1200

This flatbed scanner offers a true optical resolution of 600 x 1200dpi at a colour depth of 42 bits. It's a sturdy scanner with blue see-through flanks and a fascia that sports five buttons arranged in the style of a paw print - hence the name. These should allow you to scan, copy, fax or email, but during testing we had a few problems. Pressing any of the buttons resulted in a program error, and at the time of writing no driver update was available.

The bundled PhotoExpress 3.0 SE presented no problems, provided the image was acquired within the software. Installation was simply a case of plugging the captive USB cable into our PC and going through the standard detection process. The Bearpaw's captive cable may help to keep the price down, but means if a fault develops, you'll have to return the entire unit for repair.

We tested the scanner using the driver's default setting of 600dpi and a 24bit colour depth. Unfortunately, the test results left a lot to be desired. Our test target was reproduced with a red tint, with the white background suffering most visibly. There was also clear evidence of banding, with the image suffering from an uneven luminescence. The Bearpaw was better at reproducing colours, although it struggled to recreate light green. Text was reproduced adequately, although we have seen better results elsewhere. When it came to reproducing our Modulation Transfer Function patterns - closely drawn lines that test the true resolution of the unit - there was still plenty of room for improvement.

TextBridge Classic 2.0, for optical character recognition, and Trellix Web, for those who want a simple website creation tool, are included.

Mustek's scanner does a basic job and looks stylish. However, for the money, it under performs.

Contact: Evesham.com 0800 0353 353