In contrast to some of the more expensive scanners on the market, the Visioneer OneTouch 5800, which is a USB device, is aimed at the first-time scanner buyer. It's a consumer product with a price tag to match, and is more suited to scanning in old photographs for editing and archiving than generating production-quality scans. Scanned output is crisp with good colour balance; it wouldn't satisfy pre-press requirements, but it's more than sufficient for working with photo inkjet printers and home photography.

And you get a lot for your money; 48-bit colour depth for pre-processing, for a start. The scanner's optical resolution is an acceptable 600 x 1200dpi and this can be interpolated by any suitable software package to 2400dpi with only a small loss in actual accuracy. The software that Visioneer supplies for this task is MGI PhotoSuite III SE, which also has templates for making greetings cards, calendars, slide shows and Web pages based on scanned photographs.

The scanner itself isn't particularly graceful in appearance. A dark grey translucent top panel - which can be swapped, at a price, for an iMac-style blue one - is the only nod to anything other than functional design considerations, but everything works as it should. There's a detachable lid, three buttons on the front panel for 'e-mail', 'copy' and 'scan' shortcuts, a wired-in USB cable and an external power transformer.

The core software application is ScanSoft PaperPort Deluxe, which handles the scanner interface and image management, producing thumbnails on a working desktop so that you can quickly find the image you're looking for. Completing the package is a copy of ScanSoft TextBridge Pro OCR, a competent text processing package. The integration between all the software tools is pretty good; dragging and dropping an image icon from one place to another initiates the relevant process.

You won't find any printed manuals in the Visioneer box. Everything's on CD, in the shape of a User Guide and Installation Guide. These are adequate, but it would be nice to have a better Quick Start Guide on paper, especially given the target audience for this scanner.

Verdict
Aside from the lack of any printed documentation, it's hard to fault this scanner, which produces good quality scanned images and text for home use at a rock-bottom price. It's not suitable for true photography professionals, of course, but at the price you can't go far wrong if you want to scan and edit your own photos. Arguably the software itself is worth the price tag.

Company: Visioneer

Contact: 01483 445 480

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