Review of the Mustek 4800TA Pro II

Price £48 www.mustek.com Scanner type: Conventional moving lens and sensor Maximum scan resolution: 2400x4800ppi Film handling: 6x4 inch film scan area, four mounted 35mm slides or six-frame strip holders supplied. Hardware dust and scratch removal: No Connectity: USB 2.0 High-Speed Other features: Removable foot included for space-saving sideways mounted configuration, Photo Express™ CD, FineReader™ OCR, DVD Picture Show. The 4800TA Pro II has a neat design and comes with fully-featured scanner control software. Being one of the smaller flat bed scanner designs, Mustek includes a special foot that enables the unit to be used sideways to save desk space. 2400x4800ppi resolution offered is also the lowest in the group, but it didn't affect our tests. 300ppi and 1200ppi document and print tests were on a par with the rest for sharpness and resolution. Film scans at 2400ppi, delivering three megapixel results, were just as sharp as most of the others tested. Contrast needs to be upped for a more crisp result, but that's about all with print scans. Scans from film, although quite swift at 2 minutes for 2400ppi results, need a lot more work. Slide scans look flat, lacking deep blacks or true whites and negative scans are too light and with a green cast. With effort, a fair amount of this can be fixed, but it's fair to say that the 4800TA Pro is not a particularly good film scanner.