Plustek OpticBook 4600

Great for scanning books and documents



PLUSTEK'S OPTICBOOK 4600 is a flatbed scanner qually adept at handling documents and photos. The steep $699 price will keep most home users away, but it's a solid choice for office, libraries, and anyone else who needs to digitize hardcopy documents, especially books.
The 4600 takes up quite a bit of space. Its engine features 1,200-dots-per-inch (dpi) resolution and 48-bit color depth, and the scanning speed is around 3 seconds for 300dpi monochrome and color scans.
Setup was a snap, but we were annoyed that the familiar InstallShield wizard launched several times during the driver and software installation-once for each bundled app. An integrated, one-click install would have been better.
Once the lamp warmed up, however, we were able to quickly capture text documents at 300dpi; scanning at 8x10-inch photo at full resolution took only a few seconds longer.
Book pages turned out very well, with accurate recognition even for words near the spine. The 4600 had an accuracy rate of 98.8 pecent,and images reproduced well, too, although we noticed some loss of subtely and detail in a challenging high-contrast test photo with lots of shadow. Still, compared with less capable (and less costly) flatbed scanners we've seen, the result were good.


One other quibble: We wish we could have scanned directly to an attached USB flash-memory device, an option that would help the scanner more fully live up to its billing as photocopier replacement.-Jamie Bsales.

www.plustek.com