The Plustek OpticBook 3800 is best for scanning books or other printed matter with thick spines, though it also offers added convenience when scanning magazines or other bound material. I also tried some photo scanning, and the OpticBook 3800 did reasonably well in retaining detail, though colours were somewhat muted. The good news is that the combination of the scanner and Abbyy FineReader Sprint 9.0 did very well in optical character recognition (OCR), reading our Times New Roman test file down to 6 points with no errors, and our Arial test file at 6 points with a couple of dropped full-stops but no other errors. For anything more than the lightest-duty document scanning, you're better off with a sheetfed scanner, ideally one with an automatic document feeder (ADF). Processing the pages was much faster and simpler with the OpticBook 3800, however.īeing a flatbed scanner, the OpticBook 3800 isn't ideal for scanning multipage documents, as you have to open the cover, replace the page with a new one, and close the cover when scanning each new page. I scanned the same comic at 300 dpi with the flatbed scanner built into my home MFP (a Kodak ESP 3.2), and colours were richer than even the higher-resolution scans from the OpticBook 3800, with comparable detail. The 1,200 dpi scans showed a little more detail than the lower-res ones, but probably not enough to justify the additional scanning time, and like the 300 dpi scans, the colours didn’t pop. I also tried scanning a recent Batman comic in colour at 300 and 1,200 dpi.
Type looked better at 1,200 dpi, but scan times averaged 1 minute and 10 seconds per page for a greyscale image. Switching to 600 dpi nearly doubled the average scan time (to 22.7 seconds) but didn't significantly improve text quality. Type, whether large or small, didn't look particularly sharp (this was true whether I scanned in black and white, greyscale, or colour modes).
This is reasonably close to the Plustek 4800's 9 second prescan and 9 second scan time average at the same resolution. (With book pages, you'll probably want to preview each scan, as books can easily get knocked out of alignment).
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I timed the OpticBook 3800 when scanning book pages to 300 dpi greyscale PDF at an average of 11.6 seconds per page after a 10 second prescan. The Plustek 4800 is also slightly faster, but you’d expect that given that it’s considerably pricier.
A key difference between the two scanners is that the 3800 uses a traditional CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent lamp) light source, while the 4800's lamp is LED based.
The OpticBook 3800 is a more basic model than the Plustek OpticBook 4800 (priced at around £460). Thus, you don’t have to crease the spine underneath the flatbed's cover, avoiding the distortion and shadows this introduces to the scanned image. This lets you scan right up to the edge of the spine, with the page lying flat and the facing page and rest of the book hanging straight down (if you position the scanner at the edge of your desk or table). But unlike a normal flatbed scanner, the OpticBook 3800's platen glass goes right to the edge of the flatbed. Of course, you can use a standard flatbed scanner, or the one built into a multifunction printer (MFP) to scan book pages, and that may suffice if you only do so infrequently.