Customer Reviews

Umax Astra 2000P Flatbed Scanner

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

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).

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!

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.

We use ours very heavily!!!!! Ours is used for our Ebay sales, and sometimes is on and being used all day long. It is one incredible machine!!!!

Far better than it's same priced competitors, it comes with incredible software from Newsoft Vista Scan with the scanner interface of Presto Image Folio. It is the simplest and best scanner software I have seen. It eliminates the 47 steps that is associated with Adobe software.

Buy it now!!!!!

John

This is the second Astra 2000P that someone in my family has purchased and both are terrible. The scanner is finnicky with connections and the software is often confusing with little documentation to help you figure out how to scan things. I don't recommend this scanner at all since about the only thing its good for is an oversized paperweight!

I used this scanner with great results for a year or so... was very happy with it. Then I started getting yellow bands on my scans (as have MANY OTHER PEOPLE -- most haven't been able to get rid of them). I haven't attempted to see if I can get rid of them because I upgraded to windows XP and UMax doesn't provide an XP compatible driver.... wonderful scanner... for a year.... if you have Windows 98...

Now using Microsoft XP but can't find a driver to bring it up past 98.

I received this scanner as a gift, and the salesman assured my mother that it would work on an AMD K6, which I owned at the time.

It did not.

In fact, it froze up my computer and sent it into safe mode, which terrified me, and back it went in the box. Later down the road, I purchased a new Pentium III, installed it, and it has been fine (knock on wood!).

My only current complaints are this:

The scanning surface is a bit small, not much bigger than a standard piece of notebook paper, which can be irritating when you have larger images or text to scan.

Bundled with the necessary drivers for the scanner, is a program called Oplimit LE, which is an optical character recognition program, which I installed, only to find I wasn't going to use it. When I went to uninstall it, it had no automatic uninstall feature, and removing it was a major pain in the butt. My emails to tech support took several days to get a reply. It was a major hassle.

My biggest headache came in the connecting stage: At first I didn't know how it should be arranged. I found out that I have to connect it precisely in the correct order (PC=>scanner=>printer), and not the other way around (PC=>printer=>scanner). A good lesson for me. As for the software, I didn't have any problem with software installation. And the software is not bad. However, I have bitten by the reality that it doesn't have any on/off button! The conclusion is: So Far, So Good!

I like this scanner alot, but the software isn't perfect. I couldn't get the Omnipage OCR (optical character reader) software to install.