Customer Reviews

Mustek Scan Express A3 1200 Pro USB Large Format Scanner

5 star:		(61)
4 star:		(53)
3 star:		(28)
2 star:		(22)
1 star:		(38)

 

 

If you are looking for a scanner that can scan a full page of comic art in one pass then look no further. No more scanning in pieces and cutting and pasting pages together. The scan area has enough room for a full sized 11" x 17" comic page with room to spare. The extra software isn't great or bad, if you are already scanning into your chosen software you probably won't use it. Plus it's about the hardware and I am so glad I got this scanner, it has made scanning pages a lot easier.

I edited this review to make it even more positive. I am finished scanning all Carl Barks work he did (Donald Duck, Scrooge etc), which is about 7000 pages. I didnt even count. Plus half of that in the Dutch version after I got this scanner.
It did not falter ONE single time! Incredible. What a great buy!

I have a book with Donald Duck paintings from Carl Barks which I wanted to scan. It has a size between A4 and A3 and the foldouts are exactly A3.

Looking at the prices for what I wanted Mustek was the only possibility. I live in Iceland and got it unscathed from the US.
It comes in a great carrying case box, so A+ for packing, Mustek!

And also A+ for quality, and A++++ for quality/price ratio! Why?
Indeed the scanner looks a bit thick, as if it is from the 80's. But it is nice and strong. Not fragile.
The software design looks also not as neat as that of i.e. Canon, but that is only the 'looks. How about what it can do for you? A lot! Taje the software for recognizing text: I just open the program, scan a page of a book and on the right side I get the text without any mistakes. Brilliant! Easily to be saved as a picture, or word or other document!

This scanner does exactly the job for me and it does it nothing less thant brilliantly. For this price, you can forget any other brand. Prices elsewhere start at 900 dollars or more. And what more do you need than good image processing, good colour bit quality and high resolution? Mustek has all this!

It has 48-bit possibility, and dpi to 1200. You need a very fast computer with a lot of memory to do that! I use 400dpi on 48-bit colour and the results are already "you might as well be there" quality.

The software is easy to install and really enough intuitive. Read the instructions, open the Ulead Photo program, type in the file name you want to save it as, select dpi etc, use "acquire scanner", do a "preview", select the area you want to scan to save processing time, and there you go. All the other selections are easy.

One very good plus is also the lid comes on and off very easy with a hinge mechanism. I have a CanonLide who doesnt allow the lid to take off (at least I haven't found a way, I don't wanna break it) - and then I cannot always put the book closely enough to the plate.
With Mustec glassplate you can always put the page such that it lies flat on the glassplate. Very important point! Great!

So some of you who want to scan a book will think: hey I have A4 size so why go for an A3? Well, you can do 2 pages at the same time, and crop and process each to a different page. This scanner is, compared to i.e. CanonLide (which is light, ok), very quick. It must have a lot of internal memory.

So I really want to recommend this scanner to all of you who want just a good quality scanner, for either A4 or A3. I would say go straight for this size, since, like me, when you find out you suddenly need to scan something bigger than A4, you can!

This machine rocks!

To Mac OS X users: I've successfully tried this scanner! I can confirm that the TWAIN driver is on the Mustek site (and also on the CD that comes with the scanner, in my case), you just have to download it with the right-clic method. After this, you'll only need the right app to use the scanner: Photoshop, the only program that's able to recognize the non-standard Mustek TWAIN driver. Before discovering this, I've tried the ScanExpress 1200 Pro under Image Capture, GrapchiConverter etc... but no way. In Photoshop, it works instantly like a charm. Hope this will help some OS X user out there...

This product was everything I needed! As a professional illustrator and graphic designer, I not sure what else you could ask for in a large format scanner. The image quality it fantastic... why would anyone pay $2000 or more for the ability to scan at a resolution above 1600 dpi?! The human eye can only determine a quality distinction at around 240 to 300 dpi... so you would only need to scan things at a higher resolution (than 300 dpi) if you plan on enlarging the original image or object being scanned. For example, if you were to scan a 4" x 6" photograph in this scanner at maximum resolution (1600 dpi), the resulting scan would be equivalent to 21.334" x 32" at 300 dpi. The gist of my review: this scanner should suit the needs of most professionals at a fraction of the cost of other A3 scanners. Great product!

My wife received this scanner as a birthday present, but unfortunately the scanner ended up being defective - images were blurry, had a lot of artifacting, and half the image was lighter than the other in most cases. I had a difficult time getting through to Mustek's customer support (they NEVER replied to the three emails I sent, and it was difficult to talk to them over the phone).

When I finally got through to someone, they were very unfriendly with me over the phone, they refused to issue an RMA on the scanner until I snail-mailed or faxed them a copy of my father-in-law's Amazon.com receipt (they would not accept an order number or a copy of the receipt via email), and then they sent me a rather unfriendly email with shipping details. Mustek is not paying for shipping like most companies do with under-warranty products, and they insisted several times that if I send *anything* (even the box) that they didn't specifically ask for, I will not get it back.

While I know some of this is standard operating procedure, I'm more put off by how unfriendly this company has been and how inconvenienced they seem as a result of our having received a defective product. We will not be doing business with this company again, and if we're not completely satisfied with the replacement, we will be asking Amazon to take this scanner back for a refund.

I received my scanner two days ago. The instalation went without any problems. The first scan was done with the default settings. The result was a tif file which looked absolute horrible. Then I switched to super fine resolution together with JPEG2000 and all quality concerns disappeared. Since then I have scanned about thirty full color oil pastels of various sizes upo to 11 by 17. I am very particular about how the colors in my artwork reproduce. This scanner does come through to my satisfaction.

I catalog all my work using Adobe Lightroom 1.3 which strangely does not support JPEG2000. Moreover, the scanner does not support regular JPEG. I work around this problem using the JPEG2000 viewer that comes with the scanner software. In that viewer I save the image as JPEG under a new name. Importantly, the filename has to be changed not just the file extension. Otherwise the viewer just creates another JPEG2000 file.

The difference between JPEG (cosine transforms) and JPEG2000 (wavelet transforms) is presumably the reason that the scanner does not work directly with CS3. CS3 and Lightroom should really support JPEG2000.

For the price of $150 this scanner is great.

-M.

After much price comparing and reading of reviews for this and comparable (and more expensive) scanners I decided to drop the 160 bucks on this machine and hope that the negative reviews were exaggerating. From what I can tell, the people who gave this item negative reviews are either not very computer savvy, have very specific software problems that I luckily do not, or they unfortunately purchased lemons. The one that I bought is functioning excellently.

I am a comic artist and I required a larger scanner to accommodate at the very least, an 11x14 page and at times 11x17. Trying to scan in pieces with a smaller scanner is simply a chore, and a time consuming one at that. So, having a large format scanner is simply a practical decision. I have seen reviews that claim the edges distort some if you are trying to scan an 11x17 page, but I have not found that to be the case with mine.

I read numerous reviews that stated problems with this scanner for certain operating systems and programs. All of which are the operating systems and programs that I use, so I was very skeptical of this item. I use Windows Vista, and Photoshop CS3.

I noticed people saying that this scanner does not work with that version of Photoshop in particular. I simply installed the scanner using the directions and cd that it came with and have had no problems so far. Using the import options in CS3, I can get an excellent scan up to 1200 dpi. I simply have to close the import window after I scan in order to manipulate it in Photoshop.

I can't stress enough that you would want to use photoshop to operate this scanner. The one big negative for this purchase is that the software that it comes with is utter garbage with almost no customizing options. My previous scanner was a canon which had very useful first party software. Having never heard of Mustek before I was not expecting anything good. Especially judging from what the other reviewers here said.

I do almost all of my scanning in grayscale, but the color scanning looks good. I would say if you are concerned with accuracy in color to invest in a higher quality machine at a higher price. but this still scans in color quite well. For someone looking to scan line art, there simply isn't a better option for the price.

I should mention that it seems to scan somewhat lighter than my smaller scanner did, but if you scan directly with the import options in photoshop and understand how to use the curves/levels tools then you can get an excellent scan without any loss in quality and not have to deal with stitching pages together ever again.

I should also mention that this thing is quite large and bulky. I am more concerned with function over form so it does not bother me, but some people might care. It is a huge gray brick, about 24x17 and about 3 and a half inches high. so clear some space for it.

(short review) First of all I wanted to like this scanner. I really did but in the end after tests I decided to return it and get an Epson v500 and stick with photoshop and the photomerge feature to piece together my scans.

So for my experience and why I decided to return it:
Well to get this scanners to work it took a while, you need old software and to be a computer savvy person. I got it to work running Windows XP via a virtual machine on my Mac 10.6 laptop (I used parallels but you can use VM ware fusion as well). FYI Mac people I did get the scanner to work in 10.5 but it would only scan things at 200dpi or less. Anything more the scan would crash the twain import.

From my tests with color and black and white:
Black and is solid. Good for comic people and line art. But I still got a better b/w scan on my old epson. As the saying goes you get what you pay for with color or any non flat art (I will explain below)
My color scan tests came out mediocre and yeah you can manipulate the scan in photoshop but that is such a waste of time and the whole point of having a big scanner is to save time so I would rather have a better color scanner and piece it together. Yeah I am spoiled by epson but they are the best and you get what you pay for.

As for why the color sucks you need to know something about the hardware:
Scanners fall into two camps CIS and CCD
The Mustek scanner uses CIS and most (not all you need to look at the specs) Epsons us CCD
Here is some googled info I found:
-----
Inexpensive Scanners - CIS vs CCD
CIS vs CCD, this is the main determining factor as to whether I would
put it in the inexpensive category. Most inexpensively priced scanners,
- $100 - $200 range will be CIS scanners (Contact image sensor) rather
than CCD (charge coupled device). It will not give you as good a scan as
a CCD Scanner. The image quality and color fidelity will not be as good.
When you buy a CCD scanner you have moved into the midrange.
----
So CIS scanners which is what the mustek uses, are
not meant for irregular/ textured surfaces like oil paintings and
generally handle thin media, ie good for ink drawings and flat art.

So if you are scanning in anything like a watercolor or a painting and want a good color range and better texture quality well epson and CCD technology is the way to go. so know what you will use it for and know the scanners limitations.
Now that I know I will stick with the Epson and when I have a grand or 2 for that large format I will spend it.
Hope this helps some people. Happy scanning.

I was initially hesitant to buy this scanner due to the negative reviews I'd read, and the fact that it's the only affordable large-size scanner on the market (I was afraid that Mustek's apparent monopoly would negatively affect the quality of the product).
I'm glad to report, however, that the Scan Express is a decent scanner. There is some small color distortion (which is typical for any scanner) but it matches close enough that a few tweaks in Photoshop will fix the problem. Scanning is a bit slow, and as other reviewers have noted, your computer does start to slow down after several scans, but it's nothing that will make you pull your hair out in rage.
I haven't tried the software bundled with the program since I typically import images using Photoshop (which works just fine with this machine).
I'm very, very pleased with the Scan Express and I'd recommend it to any other artists who uses large canvases.

Like others, I was wary that this might not work on a Mac, but I had it up and running in under 5 minutes. Mac users must install the Twain driver from the included CD and access it through Photoshop ( I'm using CS2 ) using the import function. Scan speed is slow and the colors will need some tweaking in Photoshop, but no big deal, considered how much money I saved versus buying other large format scanners.