Umax Astra 2000P Flatbed Scanner

by UMAX

Product Details

Product Manual [2.04mb PDF]

• Shipping Weight: 12 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00000JGPS
• Item model number: 2000P
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes
• Date first available at Amazon.com: September 4, 1973

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

This scanner connects to your PC's parallel port for quick and easy setup with almost any Windows-compatible computer. Paired with a well-designed driver and a complete software bundle for editing and managing your images, Umax's Astra 2000P offers hassle-free scanning.

To set up the Astra 2000P, we followed the instructions in the quick start guide. We connected the parallel cable from our PC to the scanner and then connected our parallel printer to the scanner. We plugged in the AC power and installed the software from the CD-ROM. The software installation process was mostly automated, installing several applications consecutively. In our case, installation of the last application (OmniPage OCR) failed, requiring us to install it manually--a process that turned out to be quite tedious.

We tested the Astra 2000P by starting an imaging application and scanning a magazine photo. The Umax VistaScan driver software started automatically and, after a short delay while the lamp warmed up, showed us a preview scan. (VistaScan consistently waited for the scanner's lamp to warm up even after the lamp was already warm.) VistaScan has Beginner and Advanced buttons at the top of its window; the Beginner screen includes icons for color photos, printed material, text, line art, and Web images. We selected the working area on our preview scan and clicked the Color Photo icon for a final 300-dpi scan. VistaScan automatically exported the image to our graphics application. The image had an unsightly moiré pattern, so we repeated the scan using a magazine descreening option. A third scan at 600-dpi looked only marginally better than the first scan and not as good as the second.

To test OCR abilities, we scanned a page of text that contained accompanying line art. The scan took about 40 seconds, including OCR translation. Caere's OCR software ignored the line art, created a two-page single-column document from our single-page two-column original, and exported the document to Microsoft Word. The two-page formatting was unexpected, but the interpreted text was correct. The OCR software did a decent (though not perfect) job of recognizing different fonts. You'll want to explore the well-chosen bundled applications, which are designed more for home use than for business.

Pros:

• Easy hardware setup
• Detailed, printed owner's manual

Cons:

• Lengthy software setup

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent image quality, a little slow at scanning., December 1, 1999

By 

Sammy (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Umax Astra 2000P Flatbed Scanner (Office Product)

Cons: Excellent, accurate image quality. Natural colour tones. Excellent software bundle. Very easy to install and get it up and running.

Cons: Slow to scan. Scanner occasionally locks up after a few scans at high resolution (a shutdown & restart of the scanner solves this).

Summary: This is my second scanner purchase (1st was a Storm Easy Photo), and I'm very satisfied with it except for the speed: I imagined that the speeds of bargain-priced scanners would have increased since I purchased the Storm Easy Photo scanner 3 years ago. Overall, I'd recommend this scanner to anyone who's on a budget: Truly great scan quality, provided that you don't really care about the scan speeds (about 40secs for a 300dpi scan).

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Have yet to get it to work after 2 weeks, December 2, 1999

By 

Brian K. Smith (Westwood, Mass.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Umax Astra 2000P Flatbed Scanner (Office Product)

I bought the 2000P based on online recommendations and have been severely disappointed. It was delivered with a hardware problem of the magnet on the ribbon cable had come loose and prevented the scan head from moving. Now it sometimes it will recognize the scanner, other times it hangs the system with a "descriptive" error of 00000000h. I even downloaded the newest driver software...not help. I have yet to get a response back from the online support email. Bummer!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars most annoying scanner i have ever used, May 28, 2001

By 

"bubba242" (bloomington, IN United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Umax Astra 2000P Flatbed Scanner (Office Product)

i am currently on my second astra 2000p scanner. i have spent an incredible amount of time on the phone (at my expense!) with their tech support, and finally have gotten a new scanner. this scanner does not run properly with windows millenium, and frequently causes my system to crash. the sales guy (not umax's fault) told me that it could run with ME. umax tech support suggested that i go out and buy win 98 and install that on my system, because they are not planning to make a patch in the driver! luckily we have a system with win 95 running on it, so i moved the scanner to that machine. the scanner began to constantly freeze up half way through a scan and so tech support decided the problem must be the power cord and sent me a new one. after trying the new power cord, i was still having the same problem, and i finally hasseled them into giving me a new scanner, after having to send them my old one (at my expense!) the new one isn't all that great, i estimate that i have spent about $40 extra in shipping, etc trying to get this mediocre scanner to work. i will never buy another umax product again.