Rating: 
Summary: Excellent image quality, a little slow at scanning.
Review: 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).
Rating: 
Summary: most annoying scanner i have ever used
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Have yet to get it to work after 2 weeks
Review: 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!
Rating:
Summary: My Umax Scanner keeps trashing my hard drive!
Review: I cannot reccomend this company's products. For 2 years I have been trying to get this scanner to work and have finally decided to throw it away and get a new one. The company support has been spotty. They sent me some new software, denied that their scanner was at fault, and haven't been willing to make this situation better. My brother's Umax kept trashing his system. Another friend of ours has had the same problem. Definately DO NOT reccomend these scanners.
Rating:
Summary: Good scanner for newbies!
Review: I found the quality and speed to be just fine especially scanning pics for my web page. The software offers all of the options with regard to resolution, size and the various choices you may want to make for a scan if you are a more experienced user. It's a parallel port scanner so it won't work with XP but it runs great on win98. It might be good to use on a second system with Win98 or maybe for the kids on their system. It's not the best but I believe it's a decent scanner that can be found for an inexpensive price now.
Rating:
Summary: Nice scanner, but OCR software won't install
Review: I like this scanner alot, but the software isn't perfect. I couldn't get the Omnipage OCR (optical character reader) software to install.
Rating: 
Summary: If at first you don't succeed, buy a bigger computer
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Yellow bands and no XP
Review: 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...
Rating:
Summary: Yellow bands and no XP
Review: 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...
Rating: 
Summary: Software Tricky But Is Was Worth The Effort
Review: I write this less than five hours of taking my Astra 2000P out of the box. The software install was kind of tricky, it has you selecting "VistaScan 3.5" after the first launch of the software program. Well, my selection box was empty! I reinstalled the software twice, went online and registered everything and finally there it was "VistaScan 3.5". After that, the installation was uneventful. The Astra 2000P delivers sharp and I mean sharp images at 300 dpi, right on line with the Visioneer 6000b that I just threw in the garbage after about 30-40 scans and a year and three months use (firmware failure). My Umax 2000P even came with Adobe Photoshop 3.0! I'm very pleased, I would recommend this scanner to a friend.
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