Plustek OpticBook 3600 Flatbed Scanner - 91N-BBM31-A

I bought my first Plustek Opticbook 3600 Corporate in Aug 2007. The "Corporate" version just includes slightly better software and I don't recommend spending the extra money. That machine was destroyed in an office fire and I just bought a new Opticbook 3600 (the model on this page). That's what I'm reviewing here. It's the same machine, with lighter software. <br><br> This is a terrific manual book scanning machine. I've also scanned plenty of graphics and photos for republication and it works fine for that too. But it's strength is scanning and OCRing books, especially old books with weak bindings. Having the scan glass so close to the edge means you don't have to bend books much and you can get in close, even on a tightly bound book. <br><br> See those three big oval buttons on the machine? They let you do one button scanning to your computer for color, gray scale or B&W. You can set the scan specs differently for each. <br><br> Then you can mix them in the same project - e.g. if you have a book with text and detailed engraving plates you can do the text at 300dpi B&W and the graphic plates at 600dpi gray scale. Just hit the other button. <br><br> The machine worked perfectly with XP Pro. A few kinks to work out with Vista but I've been able to get tech support on the phone...yes, a real person in San Diego!...every time I've had an issue. <br><br> One software issue I've seen on XP and Vista with both machines - If you try to scan too many pages into one file it can crash and you lose your work. Especially in graphic intense scans that use higher dpi resolutions. I'm now experimenting with doing all single page scans (never a crash that way) and then reassembling them with Acrobat Pro or IRIS. <br><br> As mentioned above, the Corporate model came with IRIS 10 Professional, but when I went to upgrade to the newer version 11 it was the same cost as buying the software at full retail. So don't waste your money on the "Corporate" version. <br><br> I do recommend IRIS 11 for complex and foreign language OCR. I was working in French and IRIS was more accurate than Adobe Acrobat Pro 7.0. Also IRIS lets you select, deselect, order or re-order different parts of the scanned page (header, photos, footnotes, titles, etc) that can be handy if you are doing OCR. <br><br> Bottom line is that this machine is effective, reasonably fast and inexpensive for this specialized job.
 
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I love this scanner for scanning my text books! I wish I had bought this product last year! What a time saver! Scanning my books takes a fraction of the time it use to. The software took a little time to get used to and one of the included software on the installation disk didn't install (kept getting an error message) but over all I'm very satisfied. I would recommend this to anyone who needs a book scanner.
 
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