A3 USB 1200 Pro Scanner
Mustek ScanExpress A3 USB 1200 Pro - Flatbed scanner - A3 - 1200 dpi x 1200 dpi - USB Features
- USB 2.0 connectivity for fast, reliable data transfer
- Creates full-color 9600 dpi scans
- Scans images and documents up to 29.7cm x 42.0cm (11.7" x 16.5")
- Large format full color scanner
Price: $152.24
User Reviews about Mustek ScanExpress A3 USB 1200 Pro - Flatbed scanner - A3 - 1200 dpi x 1200 dpi - USB
Scans appear to be as good as those from more expensive and highly rated scanners. Software, however, is difficult to use and one must tinker for awhile to discover how to make the scanner do what needs to be done. Having Photoshop available is a plus. -- Large scanner
...if you hate spending money as much as I do. Probably the best A3 scanner around is the Epson 10000XL, but the price is brutal at $2K+; buy it if you can often make money scanning, if you need to scan oversize transparencies, or if you are hiring someone to do your scanning and you don't have time to continuously monitor their output. If you are willing to work a little more slowly and take a little more trouble, you can get professional-quality scans from the ScanExpress, and you'll have enough money left over to buy the NAS server you'll need to store the gigantic files high-resolution scanning creates.
To start, you shouldn't buy this scanner unless you feel comfortable fiddling around a little bit to get it to work right. For example, my Vista computer didn't want to see it at first, so I installed all of the software on the CD (not just the drivers), and rebooted a couple of times, and eventually the scanner made itself known. Cheap scanners tend to skimp on their optics, so their depth of field isn't all it might be. My letter-sized Epson, a $500 scanner, makes one beautiful scan after another of wavy watercolors, but my older Mustek A3 would gray the paper where it bulged away from the glass, and the image would be noticeably out of focus in those regions. Solution: store the watercolor paintings under heavy weights so that they flatten out--weighting the scanner lid won't work with Mustek A3 scanners because the bed is more flexible than one would expect; it bends under weight and grinds against the light bar. Learn about setting black point, white point, gamma, and unsharp masking in Photoshop, and practice until you can get your scans to consistently look right.
This scanner sounds like an old Chrysler that won't start, but I have been getting impressively good images from it, and it is much more deluxe than the older ScanExpress A3 I bought three or four years ago. I bought my first Mustek scanner, which looked like a window-washing squeegee with a wire coming out of the handle, for Windows 3.1, so the company has been around a while. -- A Dream Come True...
