As a D&T teacher I bought this A3 scanner to scan my pupils design folders.
The hardware is well worth the money - the build quality is fairly good - it's solid enough that I am happy to leave it out in the classroom for the pupils to use. Scanning speeds are reasonable - about 20-30 seconds for an A3 sheet at 300dpi, full colour. The quality of the scans is reasonable and suitable for my purposes - powerpoint and interactive whiteboard presentations to guide pupils in their work, and allowing them to scan resources for their project work. The colour accuracy is not suitable for reprographics or publishing work - but then, you'd be looking to spend far more than £80 if you need that level of quality.
The supplied software is intuitive enough and has buit-in OCR software (converts scanned text into editable text) but when scanning with my laptop (Win XP Pro) it keeps reporting that it cannot find the scanner when it is blatantly plugged in and powered up and has just completed a scan - sometimes it would do this up to 20 times until it suddenly decided to scan again - scanning the 35 pages of a GCSE coursework folder ended up taking an entire evening - frustration is not the word! It may be a driver issue that is easy to resolve, but it lets down an otherwise excellent value scanner.
I could not find any other A3 scanner for less than £800 - at a tenth of the price this is good value.
| Brand | Mustek |
|---|---|
| Package Dimensions | 61.2 x 50.2 x 16 cm; 6 Kilograms |
| Item model number | ScanExpress A3 USB |
| Manufacturer | Mustek |
| Item Weight | 6 kg |
