Umax Astra 3400 Flatbed Scanner

I find the Umax Astra 3400 easy to install and a first class scanner. I have used Umax Astra 3400 scanners for almost 20 years to scan water color paintings. During this period I have tried other makes but found that they do not pick up the soft shades nearly as well. A very satisfied customer.

Has no user CD or necessary cables. Further, despite your catalog & the manual, the scanner fails to operate on Mac OS8.1 but insists instead that 8.6 be used. The maker cannot be contacted either in the US or Taiwan.

Good scanner in its day, but it's day has come and gone. Outdated by now.

I received my scanner bundled with my PC at the beginning of 2001, which had ME as the OS originally. Just recently upgraded to XP because I could not take it anymore with that dreadful Me!At first after upgrading the OS I was able to get the scanner to work if I used the "scanner wizard" that xp supplies but now when I scan the previews as well as the scan has either a blue or red hue to it. I tried the good ole reboot but to no avail. I only have 128 mb of ram and I'm thinking that may have something to do with it. Although I have very little else running in the background when I do scan. Is XP a memory hog or what? Memory upgrade is right around the bend!

I thought a scanner would be a useful addition to my home PC, so I tried to find a steal on just anything. Well when the initial scanner a bought (a no-name brand I can't even recall) crashed my system (2-3 year old Gateway running Windows 98) and took me days to restore, I was concerned that it may not be worth it. After others told me of similar problems, the Umax scanners were recommended to me repeatedly. I found a super deal on this one, although it was triple the price of the no-name one that crashed my PC, it was still quite affordable. It set up without a hitch and scans perfectly fine, although it's not super fast and I've seen slimmer models. Overall, I'm quite happy with it for the price, it fulfills my scanning needs just fine and seems like a quality built product. I can't see spending much more for the light use it gets from me.

if you're looking for a scanner for freeway billboards or an ultra-professional, super-high resolution, ansel adams-worthy scanner like the other reviewers, this may not be the scanner for you but i've been using this scanner for 5 years and i have not had any problems with it. i would, however, share the disappointment with umax; when apple moved on to OSX, umax did not update the driver for the astra 3400. it's stuck on OS 9 and what sounds like a non-intuitive PC setup.

Whoever Packed this did not do a good job, they put in box twice too big, the scanner's glass was shattered to bits.

This scanner is easy to use it, and also have many functions of programs about this scanner such as copy, scan.....it only need to push a button for each function. So even you are a beginner for scanner, you may enjoy to use it.