FLATBED CAN SCAN PAGES IN A BOOK

What do you think is the most commonly found peripheral on a personal computer today? I'm not counting the necessary things like screens, keyboards and mice since I include those as being fundamentally necessary to actually operate a PC. To clarify, Wikipedia defines a peripheral as "...a device attached to a host computer but not part of it whose primary functionality is dependent upon the host, and can therefore be considered as expanding the host's capabilities, while not forming part of the system's core architecture."

If I had to take a guess as to what is the most commonly found peripheral on a personal computer, I'd have to say it's the printer. Hardly a day goes by that I don't need something printed so I'm going to stick by my guess. Still I'm sure others might argue that things like external hard drives, modems and speakers might be more commonly found but until I see specific numbers proving me wrong, I'm sticking with the printer. Another fairly common peripheral that seems to be making a comeback is the flatbed scanner. Perhaps that's partly due to the enormous popularity of digital photography. Digital cameras are a big part of personal computing these days and our digital albums truly runneth over.

Tied to our love of digital images is our desire to take what is not digital and convert it into something that is. Examples include old photographs, magazine pages, paper documents and the like. To do that, you need a flatbed scanner and given their low cost, flatbeds have been making their way up the popular peripheral chain. Looking much like a small photocopier, flatbeds come in all shapes and sizes. You lift the lid, place the item to scan face down on the glass surface and click the scan button on the screen or the scanner itself. The basic models accommodate the standard 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper, spend a little more and they'll handle legal size. Prices start as low as $99 and you can spend well over a thousand depending on its resolution, color purity and a host of other specifications. Adding to the price is any included software. Some just come with the basics while others include OCR that converts images of scanned documents into actual text that can be used in a word processor. Still, you can get a really nice model these days for under $400.

There really hasn't been too much innovation with flatbeds but I recently came across the OpticBook line being offered by Plustek. Anyone trying to scan a book knows that the book's spine causes its pages to rise up off a flat surface. This causes optical distortion making a page scan difficult to do. Plustek's OpticBook scanners use a clever new method that yields a perfect, non-distorted image of a book's page regardless of how thick the book may be. To perform the scan, you simply lay the page to be scanned on the glass while the rest of the open book hangs down over the scanner's edge. While this solution may seem like a simple idea, getting it to work was not.

The problem lies with the edge of the scanning surface, If you tried this on any other flatbed, the part of the page closet to the spine would be cut off because the edge of the glass surface typically ends an inch or more from the scanner's physical edge. Plustek's engineers had to find a way to make the scanning surface go right to the flatbed's edge and according to Plustek's national marketing manager, this was no simple task. It took years to develop the solution but you'll find it in their new OpticBook 3600 ($299). Using innovations like a curved light bar, the 3600 scans to within 2 millimeters of the scanner's physical edge. Even with the thickest spines, scanned book pages come out clear, bright and undistorted. Of course you can use the OpticBook scanners to scan in regular pages just like any other flatbed.

Plustek offers a line of OpticBook models that offer a variety of features, specifications and additional bundled software. The 4600 model for example is able to scan within 1 millimeter of the edge. You can check them all out at the Plustek website. Used to be if your scanning needs required scanning the pages in books, it was you, the book and a pair of scissors to cut the pages out. Now you can put the scissors away and preserve the value of your precious books while making their digital conversion. Librarians everywhere, it's time to rejoice.

www.plustek.com/usa

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