OpticBook 3600 Book Scanner Review - Part I

[Gameboy70]

Thanks for the update. Take your time and do it right. I'm just happy to know that it's in processe.

Maybe my experience will be different when I actually start scanning books for myself, but as far as large books are concerned, I think my policy will be to scan any book whose total scanning time is <20% of the total time I would anticipate necessary to read the book.

[Bob Russell]

Well, I'm afraid there has been a change of plans. I finally sat down this morning, intending to wrap up the second part of the review this Memorial Day, and have sadly discovered that both my draft and the associated screen shots are missing. As quite a bit of time has passed since I wrote that draft, I don't have a lot left in my memory. With no time to restart it, I'm going to have to just cut my losses and call it quits.

But I did want to make a few closing observations, with some of the things that did stick in my memory.

First of all, the OpticBook scanner is definitely the device I would recommend to the novice to book scanning. With my instructions and the OpticBook, it should be relatively straightforward and painless, and is certainly very reasonably priced. It does take a number of hours to get through a typical book, but as others have said, you can get used to the process enough to watch tv while you do it, and then you will spend much more than a few hours actually reading the book, so for some of us it will be worth the effort for certain books.

To put it in context, there are other alternatives also. For example a dedicated two-sided sheet scanner with automatic feed would be a faster way of scanning a book that you are willing to dismember before scanning. This approach would also be about the same price range. In that case, the work really boils down to breaking apart the book. Then the sheet feeder and software pretty much handles the rest. You can search the MR forums and will find one that is mentioned fairly often with respect to scanning.

Another option is to buy an all-in-one scanner/printer/fax/copier type device. I have the Canon Pixma MP530, which claims an auto sheet feeder and two sided copying/scanning/printing. Unfortunately, it does two-sided activities by using the paper path to rescan or reprint as necessary. So on the negative side, I think that the sheet feeder only holds something like 25 or 30 pages, and it's not real quiet nor small. Also, there seems to be an issue between the Canon scanning software and the OpticBook software conflicting, so it may not be possible to use both for book scanning on the same computer. And the Canon printer, while great as an all-in-one, is definitely not as nice a choice as the OpticBook for flatbed book scanning, nor is it especially easy for sheet scanning of disassembled books. On the positive side, it does get the job done if you are willing to do it the "hard way", it works great in the functions it's intended to do, and I think I got mine for about $150 or so, which was unbeatable as I needed a printer anyway. So I basically got the book scanning for free. But I would still think that a lot of people might want an OpticBook even if they already have an all-in-one printer/scanner.

There are also some more expensive overhead scanners, one or two with automatic page turning. If you are doing commercial scanning, this would probably be a better option, but be prepared to pay $10,000 and up. In the future, I hope to see good overhead scanners appear with prices less than $500. Camera prices and quality seem already good enough to fit into a scanning solution at that price point.

As far as the process, it's pretty straightforward. You start the software and set up the project and parameters as I have described. You put the book flat on the scanner and hit the scan button. Then you see the page on the screen as you rotate (and flip the page if needed) and repeat. If you mess up a scan you can delete the image and rescan.

When you finish the scans, the software will assemble the results into a pdf file, and can also do ocr on it to produce an rtf file. Or maybe a Word file that you can save as rtf from Word - I don't remember the details. The only problem I ran into on my older PC was that if you have an extremely long book (i.e. pages in the high hundreds), you probably need more than the 750meg ram that I was using or it may never finish the conversion.

I can't emphasize enough that this is a great solution if you have no experience scanning and you want a straightforward approach that will work on any typical book without damaging it, and you aren't the type to come up with all kinds of clever workarounds.

Bottom line - If you plan to scan a lot of books, I'd stick with the OpticBook if you want an easy solution and don't want to destroy your books. The "near edge" scanning is a huge benefit, and it's nice to have a dedicated book scanner which won't require books to be broken apart. But I'd consider a fast two-sided sheet feeder scanner (like the Fujitsu ScanSnap) if you consider the book destruction both acceptable and not too much of a pain in the neck.

My apologies once again for this quick wrap up, but I guess a full write-up just wasn't in the cards. If anyone else out there with an OpticBook wants to supplement this info by sharing their thoughts on the scanning process itself, we'd love to hear from you!

[budtech]

Hi Bob

Thanks for the very detailed reviews, they are helpful. Are the differences in the plustek 3600 scanner and the plustek 3600 plus scanner substantial? When purchasing which one would make a better buy? Also, I've heard that the software that comes with it is very unreliable, is it possible to use other software without a problem and if so, could you recommend some?

[Studio717]

Hi, budtech,

I'm not Bob, but I do own an Opticbook 3600 (not the plus) and have used it for a few years now. It works very well, especially in conjunction with the included software. Note that the non-plus version does not come with the scan-to-PDF software so I can't speak to that, but the software that is included with the standard 3600 works very well. I've had no problems at all that weren't operator error.

Since I prefer to do my own compiling, I scan to .tiff, then use Acrobat to put it all together and OCR it. That's just my work-flow and I'm happy with it.

I believe the differences between the models of 3600 are what software is included. The machines themselves all look the same to me, but that's opinion, not hard fact. There may be more indepth information on Plustek's website.

[budtech]

Thank you Studio 717.

[TallMomof2]

Compusa.com and TigerDirect.com have the 3600 for $189.99 which is very tempting.

[yvanleterrible]

I'm kind of late to this thread but I'm contemplating the possibility of scanning one of my childhood favorite series.

When scanning in book mode with the 3600, how much time would it take for a 150 page book?
What is the optimal setup to use the OCR, and how precise is it?

Is the scanner efficient with lightweight paper backs without adding additional weights to the cover?

[Studio717]

It's not a particularly fast scanner, but most of the 'scan' time is taken up with manually placing the book on the platen / glass. You get into a rhythm and you end up scanning more pages than you thought you would. With the software that comes with it, you can use the buttons on the scanner itself to initiate each page scan, which surprisingly saves quite a bit of time. (No reaching for the mouse to click or the return key to press.)

As long as the spine of your book was in fairly good shape, it shouldn't take too long. On old heavy books, it takes me about an hour to do around fifty pages.

The software is Win-only, but seems to work well, especially once you have the settings right for your particular book (when to rotate pages, folder to scan to, filename prefix, etc.). To be honest, I haven't tried the OCR part of things. I scan to tiff then assemble in Acrobat and do my OCR there, but that's because I'm scanning for research, not to reformat for other devices like the Sony Reader.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by yvanleterrible

I'm kind of late to this thread but I'm contemplating the possibility of scanning one of my childhood favorite series.

When scanning in book mode with the 3600, how much time would it take for a 150 page book?
What is the optimal setup to use the OCR, and how precise is it?

Is the scanner efficient with lightweight paper backs without adding additional weights to the cover?

There are two issues here.

First, scanning time. If the book is small enough for a flat double page scan, I find it take around 30 seconds a double page scan. This depends on how fast you lift/turn page, and how certain you are ar getting the next pair of pages (you can accidentally skip page pairs if you aren't careful). At 150 pages, I'd recommend scanning in two blocks and later adding them together.

Second, OCR. Hardback OCR is roughly 99.5 percent accurate. This averages about 1 defect per page. It varies depending on the font and the cleanness of the page. Remember, you still have to go in and remove page numbers and page headings (if any), correct all OCR misreads and any incorrect paragraph breaks before you're done. This take 4-8 hours for 150 pages.

Forget paperback sources. They scan at 85-90 OCR accuracy, which means you might as well type them in. If you must use a paperback source, try blowing them up to 11/17 (double page) at a commercial photocopy shop and scan the photocopies (one page folded per scan). It provides a larger size font and better contrast, increasing the OCR accuracy. So I have found.

[nekokami]

My OCR software lets me define page areas and exclude page numbering... just another tip.

[scanner]

first thanks you took the time to review this
second, I don't like the review much
for example, where is the time it takes to scan in greyscale 300dpi?
where is the Finereader statistics about the OCR?
where is the comparison with other flatbeds?

the fact that you are a novice scanner user is bad for the review, an experienced scanner user should make this review (esp, a user that have experienced all the failures of book scanning of other scanners)

last, where is the second part? (hoping my questions will be answered there)

[HarryT]

If you find the original review so inadequate, the best thing to do would be for you to do a review yourself.

[scanner]

why you are so negative to criticism?

[Studio717]

I used my Opticbook yesterday for an afternoon of scanning. It went surprisingly quickly. (~300-page book.)

This was an old book (early 20th c) that had been well-used, so the spine was torn (though not entirely detached) and the binding was quite loose. One reason I choose the Opticbook over my Epson Perfection 3200 was that with the Opticbook I don't have to open the book flat. The Epson software is great because when I can open a book flat, I can set it up to scan each page into a separate file with one scan pass. Very nice.

In this case, however, I didn't want to open it flat for fear of damaging the book further. The Opticbook's design let me scan the entire book without any problems.

As I've mentioned before, I scan to .tiff files then pull them into Acrobat (I currently have ver. 8) and run OCR on the resulting PDF. One of the great benefits of this is that I can do searches to locate the information I'm looking for. A big time-saver over having to look it up in the physical book (even with a good index).

One of the best tech purchases I've made.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by scanner

first thanks you took the time to review this
second, I don't like the review much
for example, where is the time it takes to scan in greyscale 300dpi?
where is the Finereader statistics about the OCR?
where is the comparison with other flatbeds?

the fact that you are a novice scanner user is bad for the review, an experienced scanner user should make this review (esp, a user that have experienced all the failures of book scanning of other scanners)

last, where is the second part? (hoping my questions will be answered there)

I'll try to answer at your questions as best I can.

OPTISCAN 3600 does one pass and 2 pass scans. The time length does not depend on the d.p.i. setting (at least as far as my testing goes). One pass scans take around 10-11 seconds from button push to completion. The resulting file is usually fed straight into ABBYY Finescan automatically when done. Two pass scans takes around 25-30 seconds per scan, with the output being some form of graphics file. Mine is set for Tiff (because that's what Project Gutenberg US prefers), but the resulting image in dropped into a graphics mod program (I forget the name off the top of my head, it was included with the scanner.), where I can crop and save in various formats (Tiff, GIF, JPEG, BMP, ect.).

I looked once at the Finereader stats but found them meaningless for what I was doing. Finereader can and does make OCR mistakes that it does not realize as mistakes. The only way to accurately correct the OCR is manually inspect the results.

As to comparisons with other scanners, I've used a couple of cheap all-in-one printer scanners (an Epson and a Canon MP460). They did significantly worse on the OCR of text with the provided OCR software. However, they did better on scanning of images. I bought the OPTISCAN 3600 as a dedicated hardware/software OCR solution, not as a testbed item. Such commercial reviews as I read at the time made me feel that it would do the job I wanted at a price I could afford. Your mileage may differ....

Speaking of commercial reviews - this forum is a volunteer posting forum. What hardware people review here are items they bought and paid for, and have taken the time to write about. Nobody gets any freebie equipment to test. None of us get paid for any of our contributions, so what you get is always a mixed bag. Please allow us to be the imperfect selves we are....