SCANPLUS COLOR 6000
Combining professional image capture and OCR in a small package is what the ScanPlus Color 6000 sheetfed scanner is all about. The scanner is tiny. Its footprint is barely larger than a sheet of paper: a couple of inches wider and a couple of inches shorter. Yet it can gather enough information in a single pass to create a 24-bit color image at 600 dpi—plenty of resolution for professional work.
The unit is quiet and quick, feeding a sheet of paper through for a 10MB 24-bit scan in six minutes and scanning a typewritten page for OCR in 35 seconds, then interpreting the text (a software function that'll vary depending on the OCR package selected) in an additional 55 seconds.
You can select your image-editing and OCR software from among some of the top contenders: Read-Right, Perceive/286, OmniPage, TextPert, Wordscan, and Wordscan Plus, as well as PC Paintbrush IV Plus, WinRIX, and Micrografx Picture Publisher. Picture Publisher (a COMPUTE Choice winner) and Wordscan are the manufacturer's recommendations and the software tested here.
This suite of applications and a high-resolution color scanner make a team that would be hard to beat. If you're looking for simple OCR, this machine's features and power would be overkill; you should consider the much less expensive,
On the other hand, the 6000's price is amazingly low for 600-dpi color scanning. (In contrast, the 600-dpi Sharp flatbed JX 610 color scanner costs $13,500.) Being sheet fed reduces the scanner's versatility vis-á-vis a flatbed scanner, but for desktop publishing or photo editing, the system will fill the bill.
A model of the ScanPlus Color 6000 with 1MB of RAM (to speed scanning) and an automatic sheet feeder is available for $1,299. Plustek US also offers a 600-dpi gray-scale scanner with a sheet feeder for $899.
ROBERT BIXBY
Plustek US
(800) 685-8088
(408) 980-1234
$899
Circle Reader Service Number 439