Mustek ScanExpress A3 USB Flatbed Scanner

Not exactly the best quality scans I've seen. In fact, I always run the scans through a filter in photoshop. No biggy. I don't regret buying it, but I'm not sure if I'd buy it again. Then again, for the price, you can't really complain.

Do not use this scanner for scanning books. The glass is attached with double-stick tape and came lose on my scanner. It is not put together with common fasteners that would make it easy to take apart and repair. The glass drops down on the scanning mechanism, causing it to get stuck, in addition to dirt getting inside. Sometimes I turn the unit upside down to scan.

I needed a large image flatbed scanner since IBM decided not to update the driver on their machine to work with XP. I lucked out and found this one through considerable research at stores and on line. The reviews said it was a bit slow and was short some buttons so I had a little concern. Haven't missed a single button, it's faster than the IBM I had before and the Twain interface is very user friendly. It does an excellent job. If you need the extra size of an A3 scanner this is the machine. Next one up starts at over $1000. and goes up from there. I commend Mustek for filling this "hole" in retail personal scanner products that none of the other manufacturers seem to have considered.

The perfect tool for scanning large scale documents, and the price is unbeatable.

Three minor complaints: At a higher resolution the scanning process can take a few minutes to warm up, preview, and final scan.

Installation was a bit tricky but didn't take nearly as much time as previous reviewers have mentioned. Best advice is to just go to the Mustek website and download the appropriate driver for your system.

Beneath the lid of the scanner is a black cushion, which can be bad for scanning documents that are a bit transparent. It turns the image a shade of gray.

Well the previous reviews were pretty much on target with this scanner. It DOES scan extremely light, especially on the leading edge of the page, with unbalanced contrast if you use it's own software. You can get better scans using a paint program that you can change scan settings (I use Paint shop pro), but the scans take MUCH longer.
I ended up using their software and corrected the pictures in Paint Shop.

And their software does seem to have some sort of memory leak. After I scanned 25 pages or so, the program responded much slower. I didn't push it until it fully crashed. Very easily fixed if you shut down and restart the program. (I was using WindowsXP on a 2 year old laptop with 1GB of memory)

All in all, for what I needed to do this scanner serves my purpose well enough since I'm just using it scan in pictures to run a slideshow of tattoo designs, and the color on those pics don't need to be dead-on. If you're looking to do a lot of scans and need them to be exact, you might want to go with another model if you can afford it.