The Plustek OpticBook 3600 ($249 direct) is best appreciated as a special-purpose book scanner. It can also scan individual pages, but it doesn't scan photos as well as the 1,200-pixel-per-inch optical resolution would suggest. Unless you plan to scan books, you can do better for less.

Most scanners don't scan books well, because you have to lay the book face down on the scanner. The edges near the spine lift away from the platen, and text near the spine winds up in a shadow. With the OpticBook 3600, the edge of the glass platen is close to the edge of the scanner. You place a book so that one page lies almost flat, with the facing page and that side of the book hanging off the side of the scanner. Plustek says a special lamp design lets the scan element see the entire page, right up to the edge near the spine, so the text doesn't fall in a shadow.

The scanner also comes with a utility to make book scanning easier. For example, when you scan one page at a time, facing pages need to be rotated 180 degrees as you turn the book first one way and then the other. The utility automatically rotates every other page. You can also keep adding pages to a single batch and send entire batches to Abbyy FineReader, the bundled OCR program.

The OCR works reasonably well. On our standard tests, using loose pages and the scanner's standard scan utility, FineReader translated without errors all Times New Roman text at 10 points and above and all Arial text at 8 points and above. The standard utility also lets you scan additional pages into the same file, which makes the lack of an ADF less of a problem.

The OpticBook 3600 can function as a standard scanner and even has buttons to let you do things like scan to e-mail. It can also scan photos, but not well. Photos had a soft-focus effect, and there is no feature for removing scratches or dust specs. Also troublesome is that the software ignores menu bars and other Windows conventions, opting instead for confusing, idiosyncratic icons. So if you're looking for a standard scanner, look elsewhere. But if you need to scan lots of book pages, consider the OpticBook 3600.

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Slides: N/A
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