Review on 🖨️ Efficient Plustek A3 Large Format Flatbed Scanner OS 1180: 11.7x17 Scan Size for Blueprints and Documents. Ideal for Libraries, Schools, and Sohos. A3 Scans in just 8 seconds. Compatible with Mac and PC. by Brian Page

UPDATE 12/2020: After 2.5 years of reliable service I have just replaced it with the more advanced/expensive Plustek OpticPro A320L. The reason for this is that the A320L's CCD scan can give better results than the CIS scan for this model on certain material types, including the ones I need to scan now. The A320L Revain List provides a brief explanation. To learn more, just google "CIS vs. CCD scan". I would like to emphasize that this OpticSlim 1180 has fully satisfied for a very wide range of scanning needs. The criticism that the scans are "too dark" is beyond me. You have full control over how dark or light the scans will be in the included software. and if you want brighter scans, this is a very easy adjustment. ORIGINAL REVIEW 7/2017: In terms of features, this is a pretty basic scanner. You can get it for a fifth of the price, comparable in every way EXCEPT its scan area is half the size. This appears to be the cheapest large area flatbed scanner by far and will serve most purposes very well. be a big problem with it. I'm loading two scans of a standard IT-8.7/IS-12641 color calibration target. One was created with simple scanning software and the other with VueScan. (No prices for guessing what's what.) This tells me that the OS1180 is well suited for all but the most demanding reflective media scanning tasks. But if you need high quality scans, you must have quality software. And you won't see it growing on trees or lying on the street. That means you need to factor the price of VueScan or a similar package (if available) into the total cost if you want to get high-quality scans of high-quality materials. The scanner comes with a CD containing a PDF manual, a driver, a copy of ABBYY FineReader 12 Sprint and various B/W scanner utilities. There is a new driver (actually two, one for Mac and one for PC) on the Plustek website that is supposed to improve color scanning. (The scan I'm posting is from there.) Installing from the CD on my Win 10 PC was pretty smooth. But with the new driver, it took me many attempts to install it without interfering with Norton Security. Neither the old driver nor the new one ran completely stable. At random times, the scanner stops working properly for various reasons. You need to close the driver and restart the scanner, which usually helps. It's not a serious problem, but it happens often enough to be quite annoying. One of the main uses of a large scanner is to scan two pages of books at the same time. The ABBYY FineReader 12 Sprint that comes with the scanner is probably the best of the "lightweight" OCR applications and is good for scanning two pages. Although it is included with the OS1180, it will also work with other scanners if you have them. In theory, the scanner has four "built-in" scanning functions activated by buttons: scan, email, OCR and PDF. I had no luck with them; They trigger some scanner activity followed by a "general error" pop-up. It's probably possible to get it working if you work hard enough with the software, but I wasn't concerned.