opticbook3600 (most other scanners will start you off wrong)
After soliciting reviews of it on the DP forums and getting several positive ones, this my mixed review of the opticbook. (1) Scanning into the gutter: The opticbook's main selling point is the position of its glass. At the very edge of the device, you can open a book only 90 degrees and flatten half of it against the glass, in principle eliminating gutter shadow. In practice, though, it doesn't catch the outer half-centimeter of the glass anyway. While there are books you can scan with the opticbook that you couldn't scan with an ordinary flatbed, there are still books with gutters too narrow to do with the opticbook. (2) Book handling: With an ordinary flatbed, the book it pretty much held in place by its own weight, although you can get better results by applying some pressure from above. And you only have to reposition the book for every other page. With the opticbook, you have to turn the book every page, and, for the half of the book where the heavy side is hanging off the end, you have to hold the book in position more physically than for the usual flatbed configuration. While I have never destroyed a book with normal flatbed scanning, the second book I scanned with the opticbook did not survive the process. (To be fair, it wouldn't have survived the process with an ordinary flatbed, but with an ordinary flatbed, I would not have even tried ...) (3) Speed: this is where the optibook really shines. Even doing only one page at a time, I have reached scanning speeds of about 300 octavo pages per hour. And if you have a book where you can use the opticbook like an ordinary flatbed, scanning two pages at a time, well, I'll leave the numbers as an exercise to the reader. If you have the money and want to have another tool in your scanner arsenal, it's not a waste. But it's not a magic bullet, either. The most demanding scanning project I've done to date, the large-format illustrations in Robert Hooke's Micrographia, required using scans from both my opticbook and my HP scanjet 4600 (the thin, transparent series), follwed by about 12 hours of image manipulation, to get the results I got. Neither scanner alone could have delivered those images. -- RS