Visioneer Onetouch 6600

Scanners that cost less than £50 usually cause testers in PCW's Labs to look skywards for help, but Visioneer has gone the extra mile with the Onetouch 6600. This device gives you all the basics of decent entry-level flatbed scanning in one compact bundle.

The Onetouch is only 7cm thick, weighs under 2kg, and is styled in a charcoal black case with aluminium-effect lid. The external AC adaptor is small and built into the wall plug, while the USB cable is moulded into the back of the unit permanently.

Three quick-task buttons at the front let you trigger actions such as scan, scan-to-email, and scan-to-printer (colour copy). These actions can be customised, though we found the configuration fiddly.

In operation, the Onetouch 6600 is fast and generally quiet, while the Twain driver is simple enough for anyone to use. Scan quality is inevitably low to average, although the entry-level user will probably never notice.

Colour image scans turn out bright and punchy to make up for loss of detail, producing a pleasing (if inaccurate) result for domestic consumers.

That said, some poor scans were caused by odd default values in the driver, which took some investigation before we worked out what the problem was.

Our OCR (optical character recognition) tests, for example, consistently produced nonsense documents until we found that the 'text scan' command in the driver was scanning everything at only 150 dots per inch.

Otherwise, it's extremely rare to find a product as cheap as this that works as well as it does. Given that you get OCR, photo editing, form scanning and image database software in the box too, the Onetouch 6600 deserves to be every beginner's first-choice scanner.

Contact: Visioneer 01483 445 480
www.visioneer-europe.com

Specifications:

• Flatbed CCD scanner
• 600 x 1,200dpi resolution
• 48-bit colour depth
• Paperport Deluxe, Ulead Photo Express 3 SE included
• 1.93kg
• 260 x 452 x 70mm (w x d x h)
• USB2