A price of $600 isn't usually considered low for a scanner, but the Plustek OpticPro A320 isn't like most other scanners. Scanners are typically limited to letter- or legal-size scans, because moving up to tabloid (11-by-17-inch) or super-tabloid size (anything larger than 11-by-17) generally goes hand in hand with an order-of-magnitude jump in price. Although it's easy to find a letter-size scanner for under $100, it's hard to find a tabloid-size scanner for less than $1,000—at least it was before the OpticPro A320. This super-tabloid (12-by-17-inch) flatbed scanner comes in at only $600 (street). More important, it makes large-format scanning far more affordable than it was, particularly for small offices that need to scan large documents.

A big flatbed implies a big scanner, and the A320 measures 5.2 by 24.5 by 16.75 inches (HWD). As the measurements suggest, the Plustek is meant to be placed sideways relative to most scanners, so the top edge of a scan target goes along the right edge of the flatbed. The cover opens toward the back, with seven clearly labeled scan buttons conveniently placed just to the right of the flatbed.

Aside from needing more flat space than most scanners, the A320's installation is standard fare. Plug in the power cord and supplied USB cable, then let Windows install the drivers and software from the program disc. I tested the A320 using Windows XP. Plustek says that the disc also includes drivers and a full set of software for Windows 2000 and Vista.

As with any flatbed scanner, you can use the A320 for photos, too, but the software lacks some photo-friendly features. In particular, it can't batch-scan (scan multiple photos at once and put each in a separate file), and it doesn't include options for either scratch removal or color restoration for faded photos. All of these are increasingly common features, even on inexpensive flatbed scanners.

On the plus side, the claimed 1,600-pixel-per-inch (ppi) optical resolution is more than enough for a scanner that doesn't scan transparencies (slides and film). Even if you crop your scans substantially or print them at a larger size than the original, 1,600 ppi leaves plenty of headroom beyond the resolution you'll actually need.

The A320 comes with a reasonably easy-to-use utility for defining the scan setting for each button on the scanner. In addition, Twain and WIA drivers let you scan from most Windows programs with a scan command, and the software bundle includes a photo editor (NewSoft Presto! Image Folio 4.5), an optical character recognition (OCR) program (Abbyy FineReader Sprint Plus 6.0), and a document management program (NewSoft Presto! PageManager 7.1).

Despite the included photo-editing software, the A320 is not a good choice for scanning photos. Beyond the lack of scratch removal, color restore, and batch-scan features that I mentioned earlier, its photo scan quality simply wasn't very impressive on my tests.

Scanned images viewed at 100 percent size onscreen had a slightly hazy look, as if shot through gauze. Viewed at larger sizes, dark backgrounds broke apart into red, green, and blue pixels, which show as noise on images printed at the same size as the originals. Overall, the quality was good enough for scanning and reprinting photos to hand out as snapshots to friends and family or include in, say, a client newsletter. It was not good enough to satisfy a serious photographer.

The good news about the A320 is that it scores well on office tasks like optical character recognition (OCR) and document management. Although its overall score for OCR is held down by the lack of an automatic document feeder (ADF), it did a good job on the actual task of recognizing text. On our tests, it read both Times New Roman and Arial fonts at sizes as small as 8 points without a mistake. It also earns points simply for its large flatbed, which lets it scan and read (through OCR) larger originals that most scanners can manage.

Similarly, the A320 earns as a high a score for document management as it can get without an ADF, thanks to PageManager, which is one of the better document-management programs for individual users.

Scan speed is another strong point. I timed prescans of the entire flatbed at 11 to 12 seconds, scans of 4-by-6 photos at 9 to 11 seconds, and scans of the entire flatbed at 17 to 18 seconds. These times would be fast for a letter- or legal-size scanner, which makes them reasonably impressive for the A320's super-tabloid size.

Unfortunately, a big reason for the A320's speed, as well as the consistency in speeds for each kind of scan, is that the lamp is on continuously by default. That keeps the scanner warmed up, but it uses lots of electricity. You have the option of setting a time of 1 to 15 minutes without a scan for the lamp to turn off. For the next scan in a session, you'll have to wait for it to warm up. I left it off for several minutes, and then timed it at 1:25 to warm up and prescan.

The A320's one unarguable advantage over its competition is its low price, which at this writing is less than Epson's factory-refurbished price for its lowest-cost tabloid-size scanner. If you need to scan at a large size, the A320 stands virtually alone as the low-cost option. If you're working on a tight budget, that by itself is enough to make the A320 worth considering.

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