Binding: Electronics
ASIN: B000A27YIO
Manufacturer: Plustek
Average Customer Review: 
(From 10 total reviews)
Lowest Price:
Price is accurate as of the date/time indicated. Prices and product availability are subject to change. Any price displayed on the Amazon web site at the time of purchase will govern the sale of this product.
Editorial Reviews
Product Description:
Thanks to Plustek’s patent pending SEE Technology, any book can lie completely flat on the scanning glass. The result is a perfectly scanned image with no annoying book spine shadow and no distorted lines of text.Whereas professional book scanners are targeted mainly for large libraries, archive museums, and corporations with big budgets, OpticBook 3600 is an affordable solution for all libraries, copy rooms, students, teachers, universities, SOHO, law offices, publicists, and work groups.
Customer Reviews
Great book scanner by Jason Barham
This is a GREAT scanner if you need to scan books (either entire or pages). There are better photo scanners out there for less money, so don’t waste your money if this is your goal. It is NOT a all in one device, Plustek designed it with one goal in mind, and if that is what you need it for you will not be disappointed.
Negatives are always so easy to write… by R. Smith
… 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:)
Optibook Scanner Excellent by James R. Nuttall
I scan lots of books. The Optibook is designed specifically for scanning books. I have low vision and must scan all my books in order to have my computer read them to me. The Optibook is easy to set up and easy to operate. I love the quick push button format that quickly scan your book pages. If you are looking to scan books, this scanner can’t be beat.
Good Book Scanner for the Price, but UNSTABLE Software by awheat2000
If you read other reviews saying the software is unstable, DO BELIEVE THEM. I took my chances and bought it anyway. I found out they were right. You can (and should) consider purchasing some other software and just leaving the CDs in the box (except the driver). I have a lot of thick books to scan (500-2000 pages each) and I’d say the software crashes at least 3 to 5 times per book (and that was AFTER installing the patch from the web site - it was much worse with the version in the box). About once every thousand pages, the software crashes and gets corrupted to the point where you have to completely uninstall it and the reinstall it. Sometimes, even that doesn’t do the trick and you have to know how to clean it out of the registry (NOT for the novice Windows user). The company does offer a clean-up utility to get it out of the registry but I found I still had to do it manually a few times. This is NOT acceptable and very discouraging. Find some other software and factor its price into the cost of this scanner when making your decision to buy. Now, as for the scanner itself… decent considering the cost (not a lot of other book scanners in this price range). Don’t expect every page to be perfectly straight the first time (I learned to live with it) but the clarity is good. The file sizes will add up, especially when you convert to a PDF. The PDF stores each page as a graphic (picture) and you cannot select and copy text as you might expect. I tried using the OCR feature that comes with it but found it did not do a perfect job of interpreting the graphic into text. What’s more, if you try to use OCR your PDF won’t look like the book. Overall, buy it if you intend to use 3rd party software.
Tags: wonderful scannerr
Tags: wonderful scannerr