Plustek OpticBook 3600
This speedy scanner, designed especially to scan bound books, produced mediocre image quality.
Photograph by Rick Rizner
The Plustek OpticBook 3600 is skilled at what it does--book scanning--but we can't recommend it as an all-purpose flatbed scanner. At 1200 dpi, the 3600 has the lowest optical resolution among scanners we've tested in recent months. It also scans only reflective material (you can't use it to scan slides or negatives), its image quality is lackluster, and it's relatively expensive.
To be fair, Plustek didn't have the general user in mind when it designed this scanner. The OpticBook 3600 is specifically intended for copying books or other bound documents, especially large volumes. Most flatbed scanners don't allow a book to lie completely flat on the scanning glass. The OpticBook 3600 solves this problem with a special edge that allows one side of a book to lie flat on the scanner glass and a scanning head mechanism that can read right up to the edge where the book spine is placed. We were able to scan bound pages successfully without any shadows or text distortion in the area of the book spine. By placing the OpticBook 3600 on the edge of a desk, we produced scans from a 2500-page dictionary and didn't encounter any dark areas near the binding. And you don't need very high resolution to scan text well: 600 dpi is usually more than adequate. In informal tests, book pages and other text documents scanned at 300 dpi all looked clean and crisp, even the small dictionary type.
Seven clearly labeled buttons help you scan books or multipage documents. The top two buttons--for Paper or Book mode--determine what the other five buttons do. Book mode enables other buttons to preview, scan in color, or scan in black-and-white (1-bit monochrome mode). When you use the buttons with the provided Book Pilot book-scanning utility, the 3600 works more like a copy machine. When scanning a thick, bound volume that you need to hold steady, for example, you can manually turn the pages and scan each page individually.
The 3600 is scorchingly fast, although its image quality is anemic. Tested via USB 2.0, the OpticBook 3600 ranked first among small-office scanners in overall speed: It scanned a 600-dpi grayscale photo in about 22 seconds, while the average for the test was about 10 seconds more. The 3600 scanned a page of line art (our test that's most like scanning a page of text) in about 17 seconds, whereas the average for the test was about 28 seconds.
However, the 3600 placed at or near the bottom of the small-office heap in most image-quality tests. Colors often appeared flat and undersaturated, and test images weren't quite as sharp, bright, or detailed as the originals. The 3600's image quality also fell short in the maximum-resolution print and on-screen tests, which is not surprising since it's only a 1200-dpi scanner compared with the more common 2400-dpi (or higher) small-office scanners available. But even in our lower-resolution (300-dpi) line-art test, the 3600's sharpness and details were not as pronounced as the results from other models at the same resolution.
The well-rounded software bundle includes NewSoft Presto PageManager for document management, Ulead Photo Impact XL SE for image editing, Ulead Photo Explorer 8 SE for organizing images, and Abbyy FineReader Sprint 5 for optical character recognition. However, since this scanner is designed primarily for scanning documents (rather than prints), a higher-powered OCR application such as Abbyy FineReader Pro might be more appropriate than the "light" OEM version that is included. The Plustek Optic TWAIN scanner driver is easy to use but lacks most of the image-enhancement tools--such as color restoration and dust or scratch removal--that are now standard with more graphics-oriented models.
The Plustek OpticBook 3600 is ideal if you need a fast book scanner. If you don't, look elsewhere.