UMAX Technologies, originally known as UMAX Computer Corporation, is a manufacturer of computer products, including scanners, mice, and flash drives, based in Taiwan. The company also uses the Yamada and Vaova brand names.
History
UMAX was formerly a maker of Apple Macintosh clones, using the SuperMacbrand name outside of Europe. Their models included the SuperMac S900/S910, J700, C500 and C500e/i/LT, C600e/v/LT/x and Aegis 200. The C500 was marketed as the Apus 2000 in Europe. After Steve Jobs returned to Apple as the new CEO, he revoked all of the clone producers' licenses to produce Mac clonesexcept for UMAX, due to their sub-US$1,000 low-end offerings, a market in which Apple was not strong, and UMAX's stated desire to expand the Macintosh platform's presence in East Asian markets. UMAX could not remain profitable selling only these systems, however; it briefly made IBM PC compatible computers in the mid-1990s, but since then UMAX has mainly concentrated on manufacturing scanners. In 1995, UMAX was the leading Taiwanese scanner maker, with a market share of 13% second worldwide behind Hewlett-Packard By 2003, HP and Canon were dominating the world's flatbed scanner market, "accounting for a combined unit market share of 81 per cent." In 2002 UMAX started to charge its US customers for driverupgrades for its scanners—a practice that soon proved controversial. Until their exit from the desktop scanner marked in 2002, Heidelberger Druckmaschinen used UMAX as its OEM for these products. UMAX also made a 1.3 megapixeldigital camera called the AstraPix 490. It is capable of recording video clips, functioning as a webcam and can even be used to listen to music encoded in MP3 format.
Scanners
Astra 610S and 1200S; these were cloned and/or repackaged for many other manufacturers
Astra 1220P
Astra 2000U
Astra 2100U
Astra 2400S, NCR 53C80 SCSI/Intel 8031 based 600x1200dpi
UMAX offers some semi-free basic scanner software for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS:
VistaScan is their basic TWAIN scanner module, which also contains Windows Image Acquisition drivers in its newer versions. It features a simpler interface compared to MagicScan. However, not all versions work with all products. In general, VistaScan versions after 3.55 no longer support SCSI scanners. The German site of UMAX has a webpage/wizard that helps the user select the proper version for their scanner.
MagicScan is the higher-end version of VistaScan, with a user interface aimed at more experienced users; it did not ship with the cheaper scanners but only with the higher-end scanners. It does however work with many of the cheaper UMAX scanners. Versions after 4.71 no longer ship with SCSI drivers.
Additionally, UMAX offers more sophisticated third-party photo scanning/correction software:
binuscan PhotoPerfect, which is a standalone application and has a plug-in for MagicScan; PhotoPerfect is also bundled with high-end scanners and sold separately for others
SilverFast is compatible with many UMAX scanner ; its entry-level version is shipped with some newer UMAX scanners. and offered separately for others
For optical character recognition, some UMAX scanners came bundled with OmniPage and others with ABBYY FineReader. The Unix SANE software generally supports well the UMAX SCSI scanners, with varying degrees of support for the other ones.
