Mustek ScanExpress A3 USB 2400 Pro Scanner

I'd grown frustrated by the fact that I tend to create artwork larger than our standard-sized scanner. I'd thought a large-format scanner was out of my financial reach until I discovered this baby, and I am more than pleased. The quality is excellent and it works quickly. I am thrilled with this scanner and highly recommend it.

I needed an A3 Scanner for art and picked this up in 2011 for a good price, I had my doubts being there is next to no other cheap A3 scanners, it was this or pay $1000+. Well Mustek, thank you - it is still running great after 10 years and 100's of images, that's some good value, it isn't streamlined like a car and can be 'clunky' but who cares?, it's small enough to be practical and is very useful to me. The software is annoying, but I use Photoshop for the scan anyway.

This scanner is an excellent value for this size of a scanner. The software that comes with the scanner load two tools. The stand alone portion of the software is not very good. It can be used to perform basic functions such as creating a copy of a document. The real value in the software is the twain compliant driver. This enables the scanner to be used as an import device into picture editing tools such as Photoshop. The twain driver provides quite good control of the scanner including the ability to select the dpi settings by number. The dpi setting in the stand alone tool is very coarse as stated in another review. Another good feature of the twain driver is the ability to batch scan. This enables multiple scan regions to be setup and scanned in sequence. The downside of the scanner is speed. I use this scanner to scan large documents and pages of photos out of albums. When scanning pages of photos, I setup a batch scan that creates a separate scan for each photo. I use the scanner on my all-in-one printer for small documents because it is faster. If you need a large format scanner, this is a good value for the money. If you need to scan thousands of large documents you may want to look a for a faster scanner.

This is only helpful for artists who are looking to get a fairly accurate and quality scan. If you are looking to scan paper text documents then you should consider trying this scanner. I've worked with large format Epson scanners on a regular basis to digitize artwork for giclee reproduction with excellent results. So this was my baseline for trying this scanner. As a test, I took a beautiful piece of woven fabric I got from El Salvador (Think Guatemalan Vibrant Colors). I scanned the textile at 100, 200 and 300 dpi at maximum bits and reviewed them in Photoshop, making sure all color spaces matched up. What I saw was a quick loss of details whenever the material was not against the glass. The scanner has a very narrow focal plane and anything with texture such as canvas quickly went fuzzy and produced a neutral gray. Overall, this loss of focus severely dulled the vibrant colors. Secondly I noticed the scanner had tremendous problems capturing accurate colors, especially magentas. Reds and magentas looked like dull oranges. Overall very muddy colors. The scanner renders too much noise cannot perform for art reproduction. Sharp contrasting lines also caused noise and haloing around the edges. With it being unable to capture artwork, it was back in the box the same night. I hope this helps in your decision making. I never take the time to write a review.

I bought the Mustek ScanExpress A3 USB 2400 Pro for use with a Mac OS X 10.6 system. I've been using it for a few months now, and while the scanner itself is decent for the price (not great, just decent), I must say that I am extremely disappointed with Mustek's proprietary ImageAcquire software. It is a ridiculously limited and short-sighted application to provide with a scanner that, because of its flatbed size, is obviously geared toward semi-professional or prosumer use, rather than casual home use. I bought it for the purpose of scanning large archival images for use in documentary video production. The scan quality is decent -- if your photos are completely flat, that is. If there is any wrinkle/warp/curl to your photos, the scans will come out with a ton of glare! Now, as for the software: For starters, the application GUI is very awkward. First it opens a blank window and makes you choose a scanning device from a drop-down menu. Then it opens a laughably tiny interface for choosing settings and scan area. You can barely see what you're doing! How is this barely-visible interface supposed to be in any way practical for users to perform a task that relies solely on vision?! It's madness. Then, after it scans, it opens a third window to ask you where to save the scan. This is very sloppy software design that does not provide a cohesive user experience whatsoever. Next up, you've got the buggy scan size selection tool. If you drag the marquee edges faster than at a snail's pace -- or in a direction that ImageAcquire doesn't seem to like -- the marquee resizes randomly, making it next to impossible to select the scan area that you actually want. I've resigned myself to selecting "A3" from the pull-down menu for every scan, even if I'm just scanning a small photograph, because it's so frustrating to perform even a simple operation like resizing the marquee. No matter what resolution you choose for your scans, ImageAcquire automatically converts the saved image to 72 dpi. So, for example, if you can an 8.5" x 11" image at 300 dpi, ImageAcquire actually spits out a 72 dpi image at 35" x 45". This may be of little consequence to some users, but it's very annoying if you need your image saved at a specific resolution. You then have to open it in another application like Photoshop and first resize your image before doing any editing. ImageAcquire also keeps a running list of devices in its startup list, even when those devices are no longer attached to the computer. I recently replaced my old Epson printer/scanner with a new model, yet ImageAcquire still claims that my old printer is available. I deleted all of the old Epson software and removed it from my list of printers in System Preferences, yet ImageAcquire won't "release" this printer/scanner from its list, and I certainly don't see any way to remove it from ImageAcquire's list of devices manually. Most importantly -- and most frustrating of all -- is the fact that ImageAcquire doesn't even acquire the entire image from the flatbed! I bought this scanner to do what Mustek says it can do -- scan A3 tabloid sized images. However, if you put a piece of A3 sized artwork on the scanner, select the A3 scan size from the pull-down menu, and scan, ImageAcquire cuts off the outer edges of the image from the flatbed! I honestly don't know who was more careless -- the software designers who limited the scan size to an area that's more narrow than the flatbed and image sensors are capable of scanning, or the product designers who made the flatbed larger than the allowed scanning area. The ScanExpress most definitely does not scan at the sizes advertised! All of these complaints would be moot if the user were allowed to use this scanner with third-party software, but once again, Mustek has cheated the customer by preventing the scanner from working with any software other than ImageAcquire. Whether this was an intentional act of software monopolization, or -- more likely -- poor programming that was overlooked and ignored at every level, I can't honestly say. But when I tried to use the ScanExpress with VueScan -- arguably the most popular and device-supportive third-party scanning software available -- the software could not even recognize the Mustek scanner. The developer of VueScan himself told me that my Mustek scanner will never work with third-party software -- especially on the Mac OS -- because the software developers created a flimsy driver that is incompatible with the Mac's most basic image acquisition utility, Image Capture. Because of this, no software will ever recognize the Mustek scanner besides the lackluster, proprietary ImageAcquire. Add in the fact that there's almost zero documentation or support available, and you've got a losing combination. My wish is that Mustek would re-evaluate their current drivers and ImageAcquire application and either completely overhaul the application or, better yet, open up the software architecture so it can be used with reliable third-party scanning software that has been designed thoughtfully, not hastily.