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A fast-growing craze these days is to scan personal photographs and e-mail the images to acquaintances, or post them on Web sites.

The practice is a bit narcissistic at worst, and a fabulous way to clog up your friends' mailboxes at best. However, I have become a convert to the trend, with the help of a scanner from imaging company Agfa.

The SnapScan e20 is a desktop model that is smallish and lightweight. For those who must simply colour-coordinate office implements, the scanner comes with three colours of handles - translucent orange, blue and grey or 'graphite' - that snap on and off with a twist of the wrist.

Once past the clumsy name and attempts at Mac-like trendiness, the scanner is a decent little piece of work at an affordable price of HK$780.

After being driven to some less-than-ladylike words, I managed to install the scanner on the office computer. Be warned, the program likes you to exit all extraneous programs before installation. When the warning popped up, I was already in the thick of it and could not figure out how to backtrack to close them.

There is no on/off button on the box - a nice touch for those novices driving new hardware.

The first scanner Agfa sent was quiet but had a bad habit of sticking faint grey lines on the image, most visible on white backgrounds and pale flesh tones.

When I pointed out the lines to an Agfa representative, he said the scanner had been used for evaluation several times and may have been damaged in transport.

So, if you find a scanner that puts lines on your images, do not consider it part of the normal procedure.

Once alerted, Agfa promptly sent a machine that worked without leaving grey lines on images. My panel of judges -  the sole friend who could tolerate the repeated barrage of photos by the end - agreed that the images from the second test scanner were nice and clear.

The software installed with the scanner is pretty limited. I played with the zoom features, contrast, colour alterations and other tricks - making my photos bigger, brighter and at times luridly soaked in colour. Then I became a little bored.

I found that a picture could be rotated only about 30 degrees. Also, for some reason files that are to be e-mailed as attachments cannot be named, unless they are saved to the desktop first and then renamed.

So if you are going to have some serious fun with the scanner, promote yourself from novice to intermediate user and install the Corel Print Office 2000 software, PC or Mac version. Both are bundled with the hardware.

The scanner's package also includes a compact disc with the multilingual Readiris optical, character-recognition software. This software can scan a piece of paper and transcribe the images as text.

Readiris recognises 55 languages -  including traditional and simplified Chinese - in an English interface, according to Agfa.

So, am I going to continue to scan pictures of me and my loved ones to jam my friends' mailboxes? You bet.

Now, if I only had time to get that personal Web site up and running . . .

Graphic: rev30gwz



Despite a few small hitches, Agfa scanner offers fun way to clog friends' e-mail