Outright image quality was acceptable, with a reasonably sharp focus, but documents tended to be slightly underexposed, with white paper gaining a slight blue tint – not ideal in a book scanner. Plustek produce a series of film scanners and slide scanners enabling photographers to digitise their film and printed images.

Plustek's TWAIN interface is comprehensive and easy to use, although it wouldn't remember the preview image between sessions even when this option was checked. One disadvantage of the lack of lip at the front is that it's slightly harder to line up documents and photographs than on a normal flatbed. In use, we weren't always able to scan right up to the margin, so some text was cut off. Most books are wider than the scanner is high, however, so you may need to move the scanner to the front of a desk so the page you're scanning can lie flat. You place books or magazines on the scanner with their spine embracing this unusually narrow front margin and the rest of the book hanging down the front of the scanner, allowing it to capture the page as close as possible to the inner margin. The OpticBook 3800 is taller than CIS-based scanners, and its glass scan surface extends as close to the scanner's front edge as the thickness of the shell will allow – there's no significant plastic lip at the front.

The head moves with a lovely whir each scan ending with a flourish that sounds like R2D2 muttering to himself. This adds a significant warm up time after any period of inactivity, but it should otherwise help capture high quality images. Most modern scanners use contact image sensor (CIS) devices to capture an image, but the OpticBook sticks with older charge-coupled device (CCD) technology, with light supplied by a cold cathode lamp. Just like with every other Plustek film scanner, the Opticfilm 7400 can scan at a maximum resolution of 7200dpi, which produces a 193 megabyte file.

Plustek scanner revieews