Plustek bills its OpticBook 3800 ($299 direct) as an entry-level book scanner, which is an apt description of this flatbed device. Although its overall scan quality proved mediocre, its design helps eliminate distortions by letting you scan right up to a book's spine, and its software reduces shadows and makes it easy to scan facing pages to a PDF without having to rotate the alternate pages individually. For those who need to scan books or book pages with any regularity, the OpticBook 3800 greatly facilitates the task, at a cost that won't break the bank.

You could use a standard flatbed scanner, or the one built into a multifunction printer (MFP), to scan book pages, and that may suffice if you need to do it infrequently. But unlike a normal flatbed scanner, the OpticBook 3800's platen glass goes right to the edge of the flatbed. This lets you scan up to the edge of the spine, with the page lying flat and the facing page and rest of the book hanging straight down (if you position the scanner at the edge of your desk or table). Thus, you eliminate having to crease the spine underneath the flatbed's cover, and the distortion and shadows this introduces in the scanned image.

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The OpticBook 3800 uses the same hardware as the Plustek BookReader V100  ($700 street, 3.5 stars) but different software. While the Plustek BookReader lets you OCR books and convert them to audio files—primarily for the benefit of the visually impaired—the 3800 is strictly for scanning to image or document files. Plustek numbers among the scanner's users college students—they're often sold at university bookstores—book dealers, even comic book collectors.

The OpticBook 3800 is a more basic model than the Plustek OpticBook 4800 ($800 street, 3.5 stars), based on an older design. A key difference between the two models is that the 3800 uses a traditional CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent lamp) light source, while the 4800's lamp is LED based. The Plustek 4800 is also slightly faster.

The 3800 has pretty much the same software as the Plustek 4800: Abbyy FineReader 9.0 Sprint for optical character recognition (OCR); Newsoft Presto! PageManager 7.23 and Plustek's own DI Capture 1.0 for document management; Presto! ImageFolio 4.5 for photo editing and photo editing; a Twain driver for scanning directly from most Windows programs that include a scan command; and Book Pavilion, a book-scanning program.

The OpticBook 3800 measures 4.1 by 17.8 by 11.2 inches (HWD) and weighs 7.5 pounds. The scanning area is slightly larger than letter size; it fits up to A4 paper. To the right of the platen, along with a delete button, are buttons for black and white, color, and grayscale scanning. In testing book scanning, I initiated scans both from the Book Pavilion scanning utility (which lets you scan to different file types and resolutions, choose between different sources: books, magazines, newspapers, art magazines, select filenames, automatically rotate pages or not) and from the scan buttons.

I timed the OpticBook 3800 in scanning book pages to 300 DPI grayscale PDF at an average of 11.6 seconds per page after a 10-second prescan. (With book pages, you'll probably want to preview each scan, as books can easily get knocked out of alignment.) This is reasonably close to the Plustek 4800's 9-second prescan and 9-second scan time average at the same resolution. Scan quality was mediocre. Type, whether large or small, didn't look particularly sharp (this was true whether I scanned in b/w, grayscale, or color modes). Switching to 600dpi nearly doubled the average scan time (to 22.7 seconds) but didn't significantly improve text quality. Type looked better at 1,200 dpi, but scan times averaged 1 minute 10 seconds per page for a grayscale image.

I also tried scanning a recent Batman comic in color at 300 and 1,200 dpi. The 1,200-dpi scans showed a little more detail than the lower-res ones, but probably not enough to justify the additional scanning times, and like the 300-dpi scans, the colors didn’t pop. I scanned the same comic at 300 dpi with the flatbed scanner built into my home MFP (a Kodak ESP 3.2): colors were richer than even the higher-resolution scans from the OpticBook 3800, with comparable detail. Processing the pages was much faster and simpler with the OpticBook 3800, however.

Being a flatbed scanner, the OpticBook 3800 isn't ideal for scanning multipage documents, as you have to open the cover, replace the page with a new one, and close the cover when scanning each new page. For anything more than the lightest-duty document scanning, you're better off with a sheetfed scanner, ideally one with an automatic document feeder (ADF). The good news is that the combination of the scanner and Abbyy FineReader Sprint 9.0 did very well in optical character recognition (OCR), reading our Times New Roman test file down to 6 points with no errors, and our Ariel test file at 6 points with a couple of dropped periods but no other errors. I also tried some photo scanning: The OpticBook 3800 did reasonably well in retaining detail, though colors were somewhat muted.

The Plustek OpticBook 3800 is best for scanning books or other printed matter with thick spines, though it also adds convenience to scanning magazines or other bound material. It can be used for document and photo scanning as well, though its lack of an ADF effectively limits it to short documents. The OpticBook 3800 sells for a much more modest price than the Plustek 4800.  Although its scan quality wasn't too impressive, it should be fine for many students or others who simply want to get book pages into electronic form.

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