Opticbook 3600 and Scanning
byI’m here to admit that I never scanned anything more than one paper for a friend during the summer, and decided from that point on scanners were one of many things in the, "It’s too confusing to be worth it," realm.
That is, of course, until last night. Last night I realized I have this awesome scanner (just because I know about scanners doesn’t mean I use them all the time), and gosh dog it, I’m going to learn how to use it inside and out, right now.
So I did. Wow, they make it so simple these days. You kids have it easy ;-).
This post will be to help all the other stumbling students like myself who have never had to use a scanner, and also a review of some of the cool features of the Opticbook 3600.
There’s been a lot of talk about the Plustek Opticbook 3600 in the student realm, and at 8-9 second scans and a special "made for books" screen, the talk is for a reason. I’m sure there are many scanners with nice specs and ADF you can get for a cheaper price (this one is $250USD), but they either require the binding cut off the book, have a slow scan speed, or are just bad with books period. Now, as the only reason I wanted to get a nice scanner was to scan books and there was no way I’d cut the binding off a $90 book, the Opticbook was the way to go, for me. Trev swears by a nice ADF scanner as he primarily scans handouts and papers though. Yet again, another "personal preference" thing.
(photo from Plustek website)
So let’s assume you decide the Plustek scanner is perfect, you have it, and, well…now what?
Set-up
This is a pretty easy scanner to set up (I think most of them are these days). The only little weird thing is there’s a lock on the scanning mechanism to keep it in place during trasit (which is good for college students and dorms). It’s on the bottom front right corner and it’s just a black latch you need to release. Detailed instructions are in bright yellow on the scanner so you can’t miss it.
Actually, the installation was one of the easiet parts, as usual. Just install everything and then what you don’t like or need, you can uninstall later. It’s software that comes with the machine so you might as well try it all, but if you have Photoshop and Acrobat / Omnipage, you probably won’t need anything but the Opticbook software.
What comes with it is Presto! PageManager 6.x (which I haven’t been so impressed with, but I’ll go into that later) and Ulead PhotoImpact XL SE. I like to use Microsoft Office Picture Manager (I think it comes with Office 2003) for my cropping and simple editing needs, and I have an old copy of Photoshop I use for anything else, so I don’t use PhotoImpact either.
One little thing (that apparently isn’t a big deal) is the scanner acted pretty crazy for the first couple minutes (made this high pitched squeak while "warming up"), but then I restarted my system and it was normal from then on. Also, if you have any problems, the manual is PDF form, so even though we love digital versions of books, it’s hard to use when you’re mid-install…
Scanning
Sure, you can play around with the special scanning things forever (not extremely intuitive buttons though, for me) but scanning a book or anything really is just this simple:
1) Make sure the scanner is connected and the little red book isn’t X’ed in your "notification area"
2) Put the first page you want to scan closest to the buttons
3) Press the book pilot button
4) When Book Pilot pops up on the screen, click "Preview"
5) Set the crop area by dragging to fit the book page
6) Set where you want the files to be saved
7) Set the type of file you want to be created (jpg, bmp, tif…)
Name what you want the files to have as the name
-It will name them consecutively until you change the file name (BookName 0001, BookName 0002, etc.)
9) Hit the button on the scanner that you want to scan the file as (Color, Grayscale, Black&White)
The scan should take around 6 seconds, then it’s just a matter of how fast you can move the book to the next page. My average was 11 seconds total.
At first I thought, "Tif files? Why? They’re so much bigger. Nah, let’s go jpg…" but after just trying 300dpi full color tif scans, wow, it was over 99% text recognition when I ran it through OCR. The jpgs got only maybe 97% (which makes a big difference when you’re talking thousands of words). If you don’t plan on OCR-ing them, just go JPG though, since one tif scan for my Chem book was 20MB (ouch, but it does shrink it to 2MB a pop once you save it as a PDF, and this is large, 300dpi, full color scans).
Since my chemistry book is the only textbook I have for next semester so far, I started scanning that one first. Around chapter three (page 100-ish) I decided this would take multiple session to do the whole 1200+ page book, with all the lifting and turning involved (I’m a weakling).
The scans were beautiful, though. Like advertised, there is no crease shadow or disformation to worry about (the scanning screen goes right to the edge so you can just put the crease on the corner and lay the page flat. The website explains this well). Just pretty clean scans. With those horribly shiny pages all my textbooks seem to have, it’s probably easier to read on the computer now since there’s no shine and my screen is bigger than a page ;-). The one thing which could have improved the quality of scans is this piece of thin black plastic which comes with the scanner. It’s meant to go under the page you’re scanning to blend in with the black text on the other side so you don’t get that bleed-through effect. It’s not horrible without it, and it was just tripping me up, so I just considered the bleed-through a way to see what was next/previous ^_^.
While I’m at it, one other nifty feature is the reversable lid color. If you look, there’s this piece of black plastic below the top cover that has some black foam around it. Pull hard on it. Yeah, it’s suppose to come out (I thought I broke it at first). The default side is black assuming you’re scanning white pages/notes, but the other side is white incase you want to scan dark pictures or dark pages. Nifty. This is when I found the thin plasic insert so it’s possible it was attached to that if you can’t find it.
The thing I always wondered about was how I was suppose to scan the other side of the page. I mean, that would require turning the book over, scanning upside-down, then going back later and rotating it manually. That didn’t sound fun. However I found out that these new programs have the option to rotate every even/odd page, rotate 90 degrees each time, or no rotation built right in. Cool.
And lastly, a nice thing that I think all flatbed scanners should have, the raises two inches up and then comes off. Nice for scanning huge books, both length and thickness. I personally left the lid up the entire time I was scanning my books; just another thing tripping up my 11 second average. It didn’t seem to mind much…
After doing part of the Chemistry book, I went onto lighter things and pulled out a hardback 213 page novel that I’ve been wanting to read. The whole thing was done on the default 300dpi black and white Text Scan into PDF since I didn’t care about OCR. Each page was about 200-400KB, making the entire 220 scans a total of 92 MB. The coolest thing was the entire book was done in 47 minutes. Not bad. After set-up and saving as a PDF was included, probably 1 hour tops start to finish.
PageMaker 6.x
I stated earlier I wasn’t so impressed with PageMaker, but since it makes my life organizing tifs and jpgs of book scans slightly easier, I’ll use it for now.
Why is it not so great? Ugh. It just can’t do so many basic things. You can’t even sort the files by name/date/type/etc., or scroll through pages in "page view" (below). That means to work your way through the files you have to either be in thumbnail view or zoom in, edit, zoom out, and so on. If you want to erase the OCR text from the document (you’ll see why in a second) you have to do it page by page since only in page view can you get to the "delete text" option.
Original .tif (this is page view)
OCR’d text (this is what PDF’s look like)
And finally, the biggest bugger, it seems there’s no way to save a PDF as image AND text. If you OCR it then save as a PDF, it’s text, not both. Usually there’s an option to have the text under the image so you have the original but still searchable, but nope. Doesn’t look like it here (if there is a way to do this PLEASE let me know. I’ve looked just about everywhere, including the manual and online help, and I’ve got nothin’). This is why I was trying to delete the text from my chemistry book scans, since I’d rather have the image than JUST searchable crappy text.
Stackable .tif files
Just all these little things that you would expect in a program but it seems they forgot. Maybe all this is fixed in version 7.x. Oh well.
I’ll make sure to report back if I find out ways to fix the few problems I have, or if ya’ll want to comment, that works too. I’m especially interested to see if there’s a free/cheap PDF printer that will do bookmarks, since that’d be nifty to have (and yet another thing Reader doesn’t do).
Other posts that may interest you:
Great discussion, Tracy. I’ve only ditzed with scanners occasionally, and didn’t think much of having PDFs until I got my tablet. Now it seems obvious to have put everything on it in a searchable format. My flatbed scanner was cheap, works slow, and doesn’t auto feed, so the whole process is slow slow slow. I’m glad there are better tools available than this. Having all my books on my tablet seems so obvious now.
January 5th, 2005 at 4:19 amYou would think that textbook publishers would understand that there is a market for giving students the choice of an expensively produced, bound, shipped textbook or a download that can be purchased online.
January 5th, 2005 at 4:33 amJust a word of caution about this scanner. I bought it for scanning in my paperback books. I see you mention that it scans right to the edge of the spine. It doesn’t. A lot of my books have small text that starts about 4-5mm from the spine and these words aren’t picked up. Very annoying when I come to OCR as I have to have the original book in one hand while correcting the text. Apart from this it is a great scanner.
February 13th, 2005 at 3:03 amYeah, the technology still has some limitations as there’s half a centimeter between the edge and the start of the screen (there’s a plastic rim to hold the glass secure). Sorry to hear the scanner cut off some words for you. Most books do have a .5cm+ margin in the middle, but it’s something to note if you’re wanting to scan in special books with words close to the binding. For most academic books (where they leave space for mark-up/annotations) one should be fine.
Thanks for pointing that out, John ^_^.
February 13th, 2005 at 4:33 pmThanks for this great article and comments. I intend to buy the scanner. Does the scanner function well in scanning other types of documents and images, what about the quality?
February 17th, 2005 at 5:50 amThanks, Armin ^_^.
I’ve scanned in photos and some documents for my mom and both have turned out great. Scanning photos is quick since it’s just as fast as book pages. I use the book pilot for all sorts of non-book things. Hope that helps a little. I can’t say much more than, “It works well,” since I haven’t tried much else other than a really cheap scanner and a really old scanner ^_^.
February 17th, 2005 at 9:18 amHi.. What size in inches can this scan..? Its says A4 scan area, do you know what a4 is in inches..? thanks Barry
February 27th, 2005 at 2:39 pmFYI looks like you can make PDFs that are searchable using the included software.
http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=15737&whichpage=2&SearchTerms=text%2Cbook%2Cscan
I just bought an Opticbook 3600 scanner. It’s really great for scanning books, and very fast. Do a search on it here in the forum to see some feedback.
I usually scan at 300 dpi in grayscale using the scanner’s software. I save the files as TIFF files. I then import the images into Acrobat 6. Once there, I use the document capture option to OCR the pages. I use “exact image” and “downsample to 150 dpi” settings. This way, I get searchable text hidden underneath the original image. The page looks just like the scanned page (but also deskewed), and I can use all of the annotation and text searching features of Acrobat 6. Also, the final pdf with the 150 dpi images and searchable text is usually half or less the size of the original pdf file with 300 dpi images.
March 5th, 2005 at 11:27 pmNevermind, didn’t read closely enough. They used Acrobat 6 after scanning in.
March 5th, 2005 at 11:28 pmLol, that’s ok ^_^ I’d love to have Acrobat…sigh If the OpticBook came with Acrobat, it’d be the coolest thing ever (well, not EVER, but in the world of scanners…ok, in the world of scanners I can afford).
Yeah, and my PageManager doesn’t even work anymore. It somehow got corruted and I don’t feel like repairing it. Can’t say I miss it.
March 5th, 2005 at 11:37 pmSo, tell me if I’m missing something or not…Do you have to use the $600 version of OmniPage Pro 14 to effectively create PDF files of your textbooks or will the $150 version do the exact same thing? I think I’m missing it, lol. But anyway, if you could let me know i’d love it!
March 6th, 2005 at 9:34 pmChris - Well, just to super clarify, to create a PDF of your books, you really don’t need to spend any extra money on software since there are free PDF printers (such as those on the software page) which get the job done.
What you would need OmniPage for (lol, and the $150 version, don’t worry) would be to make the PDF’s searchable (which is WELL worth it if your book doesn’t have an index or glossary…). These type programs will do the OCR then retain the original image on top of the searchable text so that the PDF looks like the original page, but you can still select text and search for things. This is all probably over clarification, but I just wanted to make sure ^_^.
March 7th, 2005 at 10:12 pmlol, and Barry, for way too much info on paper sizes: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html
In short: Letter = 216mm × 279mm A4 = 210mm × 297mm
March 7th, 2005 at 10:18 pmNice webpage. I just bought the Opticbook 3600. It’s just as you say. Fairly easy to set up with a lot of options in the “Book Pilot” control panel. The bundled Abbyy Finereader Sprint 5.0 works nicely.
One interesting point, “Book Pilot” rotates and numbers the images, then dumps them in a directory. You can run any OCR program you want against those stored files, you’re not stuck with FineReader. But the Book Pilot has a little menu that fires up FineReader automatically. I didn’t see how to add any other apps to that little menu, which spooked me a bit until I realized I could just open up Omnipage and pull them in myself.
April 6th, 2005 at 6:36 pmi have written some software that will help you in your efforts here. it’ll go into beta-testing soon. if you’d like to try it out, let me know…
-bowerbird bowerbird@aol.com
April 7th, 2005 at 10:17 amI’m having trouble sending my scanned pages (books, magazine articles, etc) to Microsoft Word so I can further edit them. Can anyone help? I’ve launched Book Pilot (the preview stage), cropping the image is fine. I’m saving it as TIF.(unless “something” is better in saving and editing text) Then the last box option (File Name Prefix): (not really an option) it reads: “Image”. So I leave it at that.
The problem is: when I click on next, leading me to the Bach Processing. There aren’t any files to select. (and I’m thinking this is mainly because it’s a brand new computer I received yesterday, with zero files on it.)
Purpose: Should I choose “OCR by Abbyy FineReader” or “Send to NewSoft Presto PageManager”? I think Abbyy allows you to edit the scanned text (??) while PageManager simply stores the scanned documents into a folder.
The second box reads: “Text Editor”. And I chose Microsoft Word.
Again, in “Select Files” there isn’t anything to choose from the big box. Any suggestions??
April 12th, 2005 at 8:00 pmMy scanning software went crazy a week or so ago, but I’ll try to fix it tomorrow night so I can try to help ya with this.
Are you having trouble seeing the scanned files in the batch window, or can you just not scan them at all?
I can tell you what SHOULD happen though: When you click next after scanning a group of pictures, in the box should show all the files you just scanned (not ALL files, just the ones from this session).
If you can scan multiple images, then press next and nothing happens, I would try reinstalling the Opticbook software. I’ve had A LOT of problems with the software (ARG!), so I don’t doubt it could easily be a problem with the program.
April 12th, 2005 at 9:25 pmWell, basically I scanned one text of a page from a book. (not a picture) And when clicking on the next button, that big white box under: “Select Files” is vastly empty.
What I’m trying to do is scan pages of text (mostly from books) and have it imported to either Microsoft Word (so I can edit them as PDF files) or park all the pages under PageManager until I can get the software Adobe Acrobat or Paperport and further edit/manipulate them. This opticbook is probably a new machine development and just needs to get bugs tuned up or something.
If someone has already accomplished what I’m trying to do, then please post any instructions that are helpful. Thanks a lot!
April 12th, 2005 at 11:33 pmI just set this thing up two days back. After some initial difficulties with recognition of the hardware (fault of Microsoft, not Plustek) I have the system up and running. As set up, it works well at what the software is designed to do.
That said there are some shortcomings. First, the documentation stinks. For all practical purposes, it doesn’t exist except on the Plustek web site. This is just wrong. Either they should supply a decent printed manual or one in PDF format.
This brings up the next issue. Prior to purchasing this scanner, I’ve had many. I scan a lot of material. I use primarily Adobe Acrobat and ABBYY FineReader Pro version 7. When I installed the software that came with this machine, it installed something called FineReader 5.0 Sprint. This seems to be a stripped down, bare bones version of the real FineReader. It lacks among other things, alternate language recognition. The real FIneReader will read LOTS of languages and character variations, even Cyrillic (as in Russian or Serbian). This version does English. So far I have not been able to get the software to input directly into my real FineReader software. One can, to be fair, read the TIFF files the package generates with real FineReader. Sill, so far I haven’t been able to figure out how to redirect the output into FineReader 7 and thence to Word. This leads back to the documentation issue.
So, in summary, nice piece of hardware, but software lacks. At least it lacks documentation and user friendliness above the beginner level.
April 13th, 2005 at 11:46 amYou can try this link …
http://www.plustek.com/download/ob3600.htm
April 13th, 2005 at 12:32 pmOhmigod, Page Manager is even more lame than I ever dreamed. In order to save multiple page images to a PDF, you must “select” the pages to be saved. You can’t just “Shift-click” the 2nd page. You won’t believe this, but say you have two rows (1-2-3-4 and 5-6-7-8). If you click “1″ and Shift-click “6″ you’d think you’re selecting pages 1-6 right? NO! You get “1-2-5-6″. As if you had drawn a square box with the two selections as the corners! Given this scheme, documents with an odd number of pages may be impossible to save!!
Please someone, tell me I’m mistaken. PLEASE!
April 14th, 2005 at 7:57 pmActually, Charles, I hate to say it, but I feel the exact same way. I had to go through and individually click each file I wanted to include in the PDF, etc., because not even the click and drag was working that well (you have to hit it in just the right spot).
I’m not impressed with PageManager. At all. I wasn’t too bummed when it stopped working and not even a reinstall would get it started again. It basically summed up my experience with it.
April 15th, 2005 at 9:06 amWas wondering if everyone’s “AM32.exe” is version 1.0.0.4? (on this scanner)Is this an outdated version on computers running Windows XP Pro? Cuz when I right clicked the properties under this file, the compatibility O/S it listed was: Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, but no XP.
I had no problems with AM32 earlier, I think I should try re-installing the cd program again. Anyone run into any AM32 error messages?
May 5th, 2005 at 12:14 amMartin, if you’re still having problems, the answer is you need to actually push one of the three big buttons (either color/grayscale/or text). What you see on the initial book pilot is just a preview. Once you actually press one of the buttons do they get scanned and saved.
May 6th, 2005 at 4:04 pmI am wondering if everyone has the exact same “AM32.exe version 1.0.0.4″, as I do. Anyone using Windows XP Pro to run this scanner?
Is there any difference between the Opticbook 3600 and a regular flatbed scanner in a multifunctional printer? (seriously) They both have the outer edge so you don’t get spine shadows, right?
Well, if anyone’s interested, even if I do get this scanner workin’, I think I just might sell this off, and spring on a multifunction printer.
So anyone that’s interested in buying a mint-condition Opticbook 3600(2-3 months old only. Email me your best offer. (shipping might be extra $15-25 U.S) … next stop on this “bad boy” is eBay.
(retails at approx. $240 U.S) And if you don’t use Windows XP Pro, then you just might be free of the Am32 problem)
May 18th, 2005 at 10:09 pmHey,
I’m working on a scanning job right now that requires me to scan books and then turn the scanned pages into a searchable PDF file, and the Opticbook 3600 is the way to go. Everything about it’s great, including your tutorial (Thanks). Everything’s great except the Searchable PDF part. It’s frustrating that you can’t combine OCR and PDF to create a searchable PDF file… oh well…. I’m looking into Adobe Acrobat and that stuff for the Searchable PDF part… but if anyone finds out how to do it without having to buy another program, please please tell me Thanks!
August 11th, 2005 at 4:43 pmTracy,
How many MB was the entire Chem book in PDF?
Robert
June 21st, 2006 at 4:44 pmHave you tried converting the TIFF files into DJVU format? This is supposed to compress better than anything else and it is designed for scanned books.
August 16th, 2006 at 1:24 pmTracy,
Thank you very much for your write up above.
Wondering if you could do a tutorial on the specific steps in OCRing the TIFF file, then combine those tiff files into PDF, and then “sample down” the PDF file to a smaller size and still searchable file? I am a noobie into this stuffs and having a difficulty visualizing the processes that results in having a searchable PDF file. Sounds very usefull stuff.
Thank you very much in advance. Regards, John
August 26th, 2006 at 12:58 pmJust for information. If you install ABBYY FineReder Sprint 5.0 you can in the install specify three options.
Full install (adds all the language and character recognition capabilities)
Minimal install (installs English if this is your specified language on your PC)
Custom install (allows you to pick and choose)
I have both the Sprint 5.0 and the full 7.0 versions of FineReader and must say for most things a properly set up copy of the bundled Sprint 5.0 should suffice.
PageManager is worthless IMHO, better to use PaperPort 9.0
Jim Thompson Belerion Books http://www.belerionbooks.com
September 23rd, 2006 at 6:06 amI wonder that where we have the book to scan. Do we borrow from a friend? I cannot find any friend let me have their book for one day.
April 11th, 2007 at 10:20 amRuth: the library.
September 26th, 2007 at 4:43 pmIf you want to OCRing the TIFF file, then combine those tiff files into PDF, and still searchable file then you will need to buy another program called searchable PDF converter. The best price I’ve seen so far is the ABBYY PDF Transformer 2.0 Pro ($99.)
If you don’t want to spend the extra you can search your searchable Word file, which is free with most scanners called ‘Abby sprint’, and then use one of the free tiff to pdf converters. At least now you have a crude cross index. But it takes up more space this way.
September 24th, 2008 at 1:14 am