Scanner Review: Plustek OpticBook A300

[Ralf Herrmann]

A small review of our scanner in reply to @Stephen Coles

We need to scan a lot of type specimen books at our museum library, so we needed a proper scanner. We excluded any kind of overhead/photography solutions because for this kind of type scanning (e.g. meant for letter tracing), even the slightest angles would be problematic. 
We also had to exclude regular-size flatbed scanners. They are too small for many books and even if you fit a single page on them, the rest of the book will hang over the side of the scanner and (with most scanners) also lift at least part of the page to scan. And of course for fragile and/or valuable book this kind of treatment is just too dangerous. 

So in the end we went with a Plustek OpticBook A300. 

• Pros: 
  • Oversize. With A3 (12×17 in) it can scan any book.
  • Book edge. You can slide the spine over the book edge and supposedly only loose 2 mm of the page. This value might not be realistic for every book, but of course it works better than any regular flat-bed scanner. You only need to open the books at 90 degrees and so even large or fragile books can be scanned. I scanned pages from the huge 1925 Stempel catalog without any problems. 
  • Speed is surprisingly good for a large-size flatbed scanner.
• Cons:
  • The Windows app that comes with the scanner feels very outdated and not very user-friendly. But it does what it is supposed to. 
  • Scanning entire books would be quite cumbersome, since you manually need  to slide the book on the edge for every single page and you need to rotate the book every time. 

We offer a commercial scanning service and clients were always very happy with the results. If you want to see for yourself, here are four images scanned at the native 600 DPI resolution without any retouching. 

• Sample 1
• Sample 2
• Sample 3
• Sample 4

[Stephen Coles]

Thank you, Ralf! Good to hear you're satisfied with it. How many seconds to scan the full surface at 600 dpi?

The results look respectable, but it's a little disappointing to be limited to 600 dpi at this cost ($1,470 at last check on Amazon). That said, large format (A3) flatbeds have always been priced at a premium. As Plustek appears to be the only brand making these thin-edge book scanners (right?), for me it comes down to two options: the A300 and the 4800, an A4/1200 dpi model that is essentially an updated version of the 3800 shown in my tweet above. The 4800 is going for $699, so I suppose it’s a trade-off between lower res and larger size (A300) vs higher res and lower cost (4800).

[Ralf Herrmann]

37 minutes ago, Stephen Coles said:

Thank you, Ralf! Good to hear you're satisfied with it. How many seconds to scan the full surface at 600 dpi?

Not sure. I never did that. I usually just run the fast preview, which auto-selects the actual book spread and then I run the scan, which feels surprisingly fast for such a big scanner. This final scan is usually just a small part of the entire scannable area. The part of handling and mounting the book is what takes time. I wouldn’t worry about the scanning speed.  

 

37 minutes ago, Stephen Coles said:

 for me it comes down to two options: the A300 and the 4800.

Just get them both. 😉 We also have a regular A4 scanner from Canon in case more DPI are necessary and the object is small enough. But I never used it for books for the reasons mentioned. I would of course if both were book scanners. So having the A300 and the 4800 next to each other sounds perfect.