Mustek ScanExpress A3 USB Flatbed Scanner Studio : Mustek by Mustek Brand : Mustek Model : SCANEXPRESSA3USB Publisher : Mustek Availability : Usually ships in 1-3 weeks EAN : 0748011213445 UPC : 748011213445 Avg. Customer Rating:(based on 45 reviews)
List Price : $229.99 Our Price : $349.99
Features Of 'Mustek ScanExpress A3 USB Flatbed Scanner'
300 x 600 dpi optical resolution, 9,600 dpi interpolated
48-bit color depth, 16-bit grayscale
Hinged lid for complete book spreads, 2 letter-sized pages, or magazines
Software bundle with Photoshop 5.0 LE and FineReader OCR
USB 1.1 interface; PC compatible
Editorial Reviews for 'Mustek ScanExpress A3 USB Flatbed Scanner'
Product Description
REVOLUTIONARY NEW 48-BIT COLOR SCANNING SYSTEM CAPABLE OF SCANNI
Marketadvisory.com Product Description
An ideal solution for business travelers, or anyone setting up a home office, the Mustek ScanExpress A3 comes complete with high-resolution, color-accurate scanning abilities. With its 36-bit color capturing abilities, the ScanExpress A3 can capture over 68.7 billion colors in a single-pass. With its full TWAIN compliance, the ScanExpress A3 scanner allows you to transfer images directly into any TWAIN-supported software application. With a speedy USB 1.1 interface, this scanner is PC compatible.
Customer Reviews for 'Mustek ScanExpress A3 USB Flatbed Scanner'
Do not buy from mustek!!!
Do not buy anything from Mustek!!! When the product gives you problems, the companies phone number is long distance and know matter what option you pick, you will get the same individual (apparently the only individual who works there) and he will tell you that policy is that the warranty no longer covers the product. He will not allow you to speak with a supervisor and you will be stuck with a product that does not work. They only care about selling the product, not making sure it works and Walmart even says they are nolonger carrying there products!
Everything Has Been Resolved
Now that Mustek has created 64 bit drivers for Win7, I can actually use my scanner again! Hurray!
This scanner is the best A3 scanner at this price range, mostly because it's one of the only ones at this price range. A3 is used for comic book spreads commonly, so most of the scanners at this size will be directed towards a studio, and therefor will be very high quality, and very high priced. This one is about in the middle, being moderately priced, and having a lot of the quality the higher priced models have.
The Ease of Use. It's a very easy scanner to use and set up if you use the Panel application included with it, but beware, you cannot scan directly into Photoshop, this scanner uses TWAIN, and the Photoshop branch of Adobe decided to remove TWAIN support, since it was buggy in CS3, instead of doing the smart thing and fixing it. So no Photoshop. Thats a major downer. The TWAIN drivers provide far more settings than the Panel does.
Drivers. They're, well, they're fine. I haven't run into any problems regarding them yet.
Hardware, is excellent. Well made, and does the job it's supposed to.
Included software is a joke. Don't install any of it.
Scan Quality is excellent.
There really isn't much more to say about the scanner. Now that it's got a Win7 x64 driver, all my complaints about it have vanished.
Pros:
Windows 7 support, 64 bit support
High resolution scans, high DPI
Fast scan time even at high DPI
Easy to use and install
Cons:
No Photoshop (Adobe's fault)
TWAIN driver gives more options than Panel
Bottom Line: Buy. Great product in a hard to find size at a good price.
Worst customer service ever
When I bought this scanner, I loved it. It was everything I needed at the right price. Then I upgraded my computer to windows 7. Well, this scanner doesn't support it. More than 20 inquiries about whether a driver will be forthcoming have resulted in NO RESPONSE from Mustek. I do no believe they ever intend to update te drivers, leaving this scanner dead in the water for newer computers and now completely useless to me. I would never buy anything from Mustek ever again no matter how good it looks on paper.
How To Install on a Mac
I need to buy a large format scanner soon, and read a lot of reviews regarding software problems on another listing of this scanner on Marketadvisory. So I decided to try installing the software before buying it. Thought I would post this. Hope it helps...
I have an iMac G5 (no intel) with 10.4.11, and this installed the Driver Software successfully...
1. Updated Free Stuffit Expander Update on the Stuffit website.
2. Went to the Driver Download page on the Mustek website... Mustek Support>Scanner>USB Port>A3 USB 1200Pro.
3. Click 10.4 Install. (Did not work on Safari. Got a page of Code.)
4. Opened Firefox.
5. Went to the Driver Download page on the Mustek website... Mustek Support>Scanner>USB Port>A3 USB 1200Pro.
6. Click 10.4 Install.
7. Found Installer on Desktop, Double Clicked on it, followed instructions...
8. Photoshop>File Menu>Import...
9. Saw ScanExpress A3 USB 1200 Pro right there in the Menu. Woohoo!
Without a Twain Plug In, it may not work with Graphic Converter. I may ask Thorsten in Germany after I buy the scanner.
Now I just need to buy this scanner and see if it actually works!
Since I will only be using this scanner for very large items, mostly 12"x12", the 1200x1200 resolution is absolutely fine. It's only when scanning small photographs and things that you may want to enlarge some day, that you need a better quality scanner with higher resolution, and with the price of good regular size scanners down, why not have two?? Yay!
Inexpensive Large Format Scanner - not Mac Friendly
I scan a lot of documents for my business as it makes it easier than maintaining loads of paper. Normally, I use Canon scanners (which are very Mac friendly) to scan documents into PDFs.
However, Canon doesn't make a scanner (that I know of) that can handle Legal size paper, so I went in search of a large format scanner to convert the few documents I have in that size to PDFs. This was the most affordable by far, and the price was right considering how little I plan to use it.
As other reviewers have noted, there is a TWAIN driver available for OS X that will allow this scanner to work with Macs. However, this requires that you have some sort of software on your system that can use it. With Canon scanners, one can use Preview to acquire the image: simply plug in the scanner and go. It doesn't work with this scanner.
Since I have Photoshop, I was able to scan an image into that application. However, it was a far cry from the easy of use of the Canon products. They ship with a "toolbox" app that makes it easy to scan in a number of documents, similar to making copies on a photocopier, and save the whole thing as a single PDF document.
While Photoshop can save images as PDFs, it seemed very slow and in the end I would have had to take a number of individual PDFs and combine them together.
Determined to find a workaround, I fired up a Windows VM and installed the default Mustek tools. While not 100% Mac I found a procedure that worked well enough that I was able to get my PDFs in a timely fashion (although it is a far cry from the ease of Canon's tools).
1) Launch the "Panel" application that Mustek provides for Windows.
2) Configure your scan setting (mouse over the various icons until you find the "Settings" one).
3) Scan the first page (again, mouse of the icons - it's the first main icon on the left)
4) Once the first page is scanned, another dialog will appear. The icon on the bottom right will allow you to do a "new" scan which will add the image to the queue.
5) Scan the next page using the "new scan" icon in this dialog
6) Repeat until all pages have been scanned
7) When finished, click on the "To AP/Save" icon.
8) After some time (depending on the number of pages), there will be a TIFF formatted image file in the "My Documents" directory
9) Copy that file to the Mac (using either the built-in VM tools or pscp - Google "putty download" if you are familiar with scp)
10) Open the TIFF file with Preview and "Save As" a PDF
Kludgy, I know, but for as inexpensive as this scanner is I'm not sure there is a better way.
So, if you are a Mac user who uses Photoshop and you need to deal with a lot of large scale images, this scanner may work well for you. If not, or you are like me and want to scan in PDFs, etc., only consider this if you absolutely need a large format scanner.
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