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Microtek Releases $100 Color Flatbed

Scanner vendors' brutal price war shows no sign of letting up.

By Dan Littman, PCWorld   

Vanishingly thin profit margins have cut the ranks of scanner vendors. Storm Technology closed up shop in November, for example, and Visioneer divested its scanner operations in December. But the downward price spiral shows no sign of slowing.

Microtek is running with the risk-takers. The company has just announced a 36-bit color flatbed scanner for about $100, and USB versions of several inexpensive models.

The new SlimScan C6 scans at true 600-by-1200 dot-per-inch resolution. A button on the unit triggers a scan and launches ScanSuite, a utility that feeds the captured image to software for faxing, printing, optical character recognition, or adding to a document database. Another utility, ScanWizard, lets you define regions of an image in which to capture or clean up dot patterns and other junk before saving the image.

At only 1.7 inches thick, the SlimScan C6 could fit comfortably in a carry-on bag or even in most briefcases (it's 16.5 inches long). It comes loaded with software, including Adobe PhotoDeluxe, Ulead's PhotoImpact, Caere's OmniPage Limited Edition (an OCR package), and PageKeeper Standard (document-management software).

Microtek is shipping the SlimScan C6 with a parallel port for $99 (estimated street price). A USB model will ship next month for $109. The company has also begun shipping USB versions of two older models, the $79 SlimScan C3 and the $129 legal-size ScanMaker X6.

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