Aesthetically, the 8100 OneTouch is more pleasing than most scanners, and more importantly it's pretty compact so it won't take up too much space on your desk. As with most scanners these days, it offers a USB port connection, although a parallel port option is also here for those with older PCs. It also boasts 600 x 1200 resolution scanning at full-colour.

The USB installation process was a breeze, as was setting up the driver software, PaperPort. This is actually a nice little driver, with a range of pre-defined scanning options which are easy to use for beginners. A decent range of image adjustments can be made if you know what you're doing, with full control over brightness, contrast and gamma.

Paperport also handles OCR adeptly, and it has a built in image editing program which, while fairly basic, does the job (and has special filters to remove red-eye, sharpen images and so on). It's pretty smart that all this functionality is integrated into the driver software.

What's also very convenient about the OneTouch is the namesake buttons on the front of the scanner. With a single press of one of these, you can scan, perform a copy or automatically attach a scanned image to an email, without needing to touch anything on the PC. Furthermore, these buttons are fully customisable so you can redefine them to do whatever you want.

When we ran the model through some test scans, it produced somewhat mixed results. In terms of speed, this is a very fast scanner, but although it captures details quite nicely the scan quality isn't perfect. It was a touch too dark in our tests, and banding marred the test scan results somewhat, although not so much as to ruin the image.

Verdict
The 8100 has some great features including fully customisable buttons and smart driver software, but while it's a very fast scanner the actual scan quality wasn't quite perfect. Otherwise, though, it's a very solid mid-range scanner.

Company: Visioneer

Contact: 020 8334 8066

Tags: image scanner universal serial bus paperport optical character recognition image editing hardware mac os x leopard graphics