The OneTouch 8920 from Visioneer is a quick, easy to use scanner, which comes with a good software bundle. However, this is another scanner that sacrifices quality for speed.

One of the best points of the OneTouch 8920 is how easy it is to set up and use. Seven one-touch buttons on the front panel - scan, copy, OCR, fax, e-mail, a custom button and cancel - control all the scanning and 'send' functions. Customising and configuring the scanning functions is made easy by using the supplied ScanManager software.

Although the 35mm transparency adaptor is built in, it's so small (scanning area 25mm x 37mm) that it just manages a single slide and care needs to be taken when using negatives to avoid damaging them.

Visioneer supplies the OneTouch 8920 with a one year warranty and a good software bundle, comprising Adobe Photoshop LE, ScanSoft PaperPort Deluxe 7.0, TextBridge Pro 9 (an OCR program) and Scan Manager Pro.

However, one of the best features of the OneTouch 8920, its speed, compromises what a scanner is all about, namely image quality. When tested, instead of producing bright clear colours, the output consisted of muddy colours with some faint areas disappearing completely, while greyscale scan were even worse; out of focus and with lost detail. Even negatives suffered; images were fuzzy and grainy and in some cases suffered from poor colour matching.

Unquestionably, the OneTouch 8920 is a fast USB 1.1 scanner but its downfall is its poor imaging, which is fine for scanning documents with few graphics, but not appropriate for good quality image scanning or film/negative scanning.