Review by Ryuji Suzuki for Book Scanner
Rating:
If you have to scan books, this is probably the best option below a few thousand dollars. It indeed scans book pages without the dark lines around the binding line. If you have pages with contents printed very close to the binding line, you may have to adjust the scanning area and the book position, but most of the time, you have more than 5mm of blank margin near the binding line, and there is no problem.

The image quality, build quality, scan speed, etc. compare with a general purpose flatbed scanner of 1/4 the price. If your main application is not scanning books, I do not recommend this scanner.

One problem with this scanner is that it requires Microsoft Windows environment to work. It does not work with Vuescan on Mac or Linux. The only solution is to use a virtualization software (e.g., Parallels or VMware) or use Bootcamp function of MacOS Leopard, and run a copy of windows. If you do this, the scanner works fine on Mac OS.

Another problem is that the software is not very good. It is buggy and awkward.

However, these problems may be ok if you set up perfectly and keep scanning the whole book.

Another problem is that this scanner is very slow. It takes 8 seconds to scan a page at 300dpi and then 4 more seconds before start scanning the next page. This is more time than I need to manually flip the page and place the book. The scanner needs improvement in this area. Ideally, I want the scan to complete in 3 seconds and proceed to the next scan in 1 second. If this is realized with less than doubling of the price, I’d give it a 4.5 star rating.

I use this scanner to scan old, borrowed, out-of-print books in the field of my research. If the book is currently in print, or abundant in used market, I think it is best to buy a second copy, break the binding, and scan it through ScanSnap or similar document scanner. This way, you can save a lot of work and time. The desktop ScanSnap is a truly a 5-star product for scanning documents.

Another area this scanner can be limiting is the scanning area. It can scan US letter size or ISO A4 size. However, some magazines and art monographs use page size larger than what this scanner can handle. What would be very nice is an ultrafast tabloid scanner that uses SEE technology and real TWAIN interface and works with any scanner software. Such a product may cost 4x the price but I’d be happy to use one.

Review by R. Smith for Book Scanner
Rating:
… but when something works it seems less people take the time to say so. I’ve had my 3600 for over 2 years. Teamed with Omnipage Pro (I said Pro) and Acrobat Pro (Pro, again) it has given me a nice searchable version of the significant books of my trade.

No, it’s not a 500 page per minute $12k robot with dual digital SLRs. It’s a flatbed scanner of moderate resolutions (it’s not made for turning photographis into poster-size prints) made specifically to get into the nooks and crannies of Books.

As noted the scanner does its thing by having a very thin edge that your book hangs off of (and it is a thick scanner on purpose: to give your books room to hang down). Actually, it is a smart idea and it is simple to use.

Now, lets be realistic, there is a logical limit to how thin an edge can be and still have a bulb go back and forth in the chassis underneath so understand that it’s not great for cheap little paperbacks and instead is best for real size books or at least trade paperbacks that have at least 1.5 cm between the glue and the text.

It has big user-proof buttons on the hardware and the software is kind of cartoony (not as in annimated characters.. more like Linux fare, big colored borders and just a kind of non-industrial-pro feel)

But it works. And it works fine for what it is… and it is unique in the marketplace.

For me it worked fine on XP and it’s been working fine on my Vistas since the company put out the updated software early in 2007. BTW: 64bit too (I use it mostly on my Vista64 Ultimate Ferrari 4000).

Reality check: Each page scan takes between 5 and 6 seconds, that adds up for sure but that’s the cost of a $250 machine. Books can take long to complete scanning and then you have to post-process them; so I have learned to live with and make the most of the reality. I do the scans while watching tv and/or indoor-cycling (I have a bike trainer “desk”, so I can bike, watch tv and scan a book all at the same time but that’s me). Expect a 500 page computer book to take 4 or 5 hours or a couple of nights … but you’d just be watching tv anyway so consider it gravy that now you eventually get something done along with sitting on your butt

When a page is scanned, you flip the book over and press the big button again to get the next page, the scanner does the imzge flipping (unless you mis-scan a page as is easy to do once you get into a groove. If/when you get out of flip-sync the you have to scan twice to get back on track.)

Like I said I’ve had mine a long while.. and personally I’ve never had it once freeze my computer… sorry to the other reviewers, it’s my experience but maybe I keep my machines cleaner of unrelated silliware and registry-slowers than some other folks.

Here’re my tips:

1) Scan to individual high resolution jpgs or tifs, the unit will incrementally name them.

2) when done open them all in Omnipage Pro (PRO) and let it do the OCR.

3) export to PDF from Omnipage with graphic text and searchable text.

4) open in Acrobat Pro to rename the pages, tree the pages under the chapters and index. Save out to a lower resolution to save file space it desired

5) keep the high resolution PDF backed up somewhere like on an external media drive and keep all of the scanned page images for at least a week or two… just in case after really using the output PDF you realize that it could use some OCR or compresssion tweaking. Otherwise you have to start all over again and that is a lesson you don’t want to learn yourself:)

Review by M. Giles for Book Scanner
Rating:
If you’ve ever had to scan a book, you’ll appreciate just how difficult it can be on an ordinary flatbed scanner. This scanner does go a long way to make book scanning a lot easier.

Build quality of this scanner is on par with most really low budget scanners, but guessing that you’re not planning to knock nails into a wall with it – that shouldn’t be much of a problem, but having said that, I don’t fancy its chances in a commercial environment..

Installing the software in Win2K was a real pain. Instructions advise you to connect scanner and then install the software, but this seems to be contrary to most other USB scanners where they’d advise you to install the software first and then plug in the scanner (I guess this applies to Win2K only). I followed the instructions to the letter, only to have the installation fail. It then took me another hour of configuring Win2K just to get it to recognise the scanner, whereupon I installed the software first and then plugged in the scanner. The twain software works fine. My only objection to it is that the software looks as though it was written for a two year old by Fisher-Price. It is just unbelievably awful, but like I said, it does what it’s supposed to do.

The quality of the scans (again) on par to low LOW budget scanners. Both my basic Canon and Epson just tower over this in terms of image quality. Every single image has to be corrected in Adobe Photoshop.

If you need to scan books, then this works far better than any ordinary flatbed scanner. If you want a scanner to scan books and other documents, buy this scanner and a basic Canon/Epson/HP etc to go with it.