Plustek OpticBook

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Update needed

The Plustek OpticBook is still for sale, but the 3600 model described below is not. The current model appears to be the 3800L, wiht a 6mm margin.

cursory review by Vaguery

The Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner line is an excellent high-quality flatbed scanner designed for scanning books without damaging them. Unlike typical flatbed scanners, which have a large plastic "margin" around the edge of the glass platen, the OpticBook has one margin that is a mere 5mm in width—about the width of the gutter of most books. It's made to scan bound books.

It does it well.

Short of a Kirtas robotic scanner, the OpticBook 3600 is probably the best idea for DP book scanning. In ideal conditions it's able to scan almost all of a page when the book's covers are opened at a 95° angle. This is great for fragile or valuable books, since laying them flat on a standard flatbed often destroys the binding. For many content providers, the only reasonable alternative to laying the book flat is disbinding it entirely. Also patently not good for the book.

But do note that I said "ideal conditions". 5mm is the nominal gutter size for a well-bound, limber, svelte "nominal" book. If the volume is, say, a bound periodical that's 10cm thick, there's no way you can get that 5mm margin to line up with the gutter without stressing the binding after all. You will find yourself shifting and skewing and shoving and grunting to get the page over the platen, or else you'll find a big, black smear along the gutter where the page curls away from flat. The same applies to tightly rebound library books, or books with especially fragile pages. In my experience, you can get away with about a 5mm curl if you scan the page in grayscale. Otherwise, words will be obscured by the shadow of the distant page.

But still, the OpticBook is a far better way to treat old books than most affordable alternatives.

In a loosely-bound octavo book, we can scan 100-200 pages an hour at 400-600 dpi using the custom software that comes with the scanner. Get a nice recorded book playing on your iPod, and you'll finish the scanning of an average octavo volume before you know it. For larger volumes, or fragile ones, or troublesome thick or tight ones, the speed might drop to 50-100 pages per hour. As I said, better than the alternatives.

The scanner driver software (BookPilot) has all the standard features you'd expect (Contrast and Brightness, curves, some color correction, and a Descreen that may or may not actually work). If you really want to use ABBYY FineReader you can scan directly to that. But you really shouldn't. The custom Plustek BookPilot software flips alternate pages, and does a fine job of brightening and realigning the text in the gutters automatically. Most important—and this is a very big plus indeed—it works when you press the big black "Scan" button on the machine. You place the book, press the button, flip the book, press the button, rinse and repeat. And Bob's yer uncle.

I note there are newer versions than the basic OpticBook 3600 we own. A Plus. A Pro. Since the "upgrade" appears to be the inclusion of Adobe PDF-generating software, it's questionable whether the upgrade would be worth the effort for a DP owner.

Some remarks by Jeroen Hellingman

I have the OpticBook for a year or so now, and can add a few remarks.

1. The speed is excellent, but drops dramatically when you try to scan above 300 DPI.
2. The connection between the glass and the side of the scanner is not completely closed, which means dust can easily accumulate inside the scanner. I regularly have to clean out dust from the inside.
3. Apart from the software that runs the one-button scanning process, the software is not particularly user-friendly.
4. The first one or two centimeters from the edge are typically a bit darker than the rest of the scan.
5. The color quality is lower than most other recent scanner's I have used. (Including Epsons and HPs.)

Still, I have not seen a better alternative for scanning books, so I keep using it.

Non-PC use

Does it work with GNU/Linux? —Keichwa 21:23, 21 May 2006 (PDT)

Doesn't work with SANE, at least: [1]. Plustek has not been cooperative and there's not been a lot of progress on reverse engineering a driver: [2] Malcolm Farmer 02:20, 22 May 2006 (PDT)

It doesn't work on a Mac, either. But my experience — two years ago, mind you, after it had been announced but before it was released — when I emailed tech support was (a) I got a phone call from their chief English-speaking engineer in Taiwan, who (b) specially arranged to have their engineers test it on Macs running VirtualPC, and (c) took my suggestions to heart. But but I think they've handed over sales and service to a crappy American firm since then.

The main concern with running it from a *nix flavor is the loss of the software. The workflow slows down to molasses that way, unfortunately. The main speed benefits (beyond the not-hurting-books part) from using the hardware are, amazingly, purely physical: Simpler positioning, and simpler one-button interface. Unless the software handles the one-button part, you'd lose a lot.

We bought a cheap WalMart PC, made sure it wasn't attached to the LAN except through a bunch of firewalls, and use it as a dedicated scanning station now. Vaguery 03:51, 22 May 2006 (PDT)

Malcolm's second link above is now broken; page has been moved. I'm a bit wary of editing someone else's comment, so I'm just noting the new location here: TU-Chemnitz' wiki page about non-usefulness of 3600 in Linux rassilon 09:03, 18 August 2007 (PDT)