Mustek A3 1200 USB Scanner

I ordered a new Mustek A3 1200 scanner a while ago and it just recently arrived.

There was nothing wrong with my Canon brand scanner other than it’s platen (scanning surface) was too small for most artwork, and, as a result, I had to scan things in pieces and then ‘sew’ them together in Photoshop… which is a time consuming pain.  The problem of scanning in pieces is compounded by the fact that you have to keep everything straight… if one of the parts you have scanned is a little off kilter, getting it to match up right is so hard that I discovered it is actually easier to scan the whole thing over again.

The Mustek A3 1200 cost me about $160.00 (I ordered mine from Amazon where the price has also recently gone up (but is still cheaper than Mustek Direct)).  The platen is large enough to accommodate a single sheet of ~17×11 inch paper (the size I have been using for my Shaver Comic book). Although the Mustek has a maximum 300 dpi resolution (much lower than the Canon Scanner I had been using), I usually end up reducing to ~63% of original size for reproduction, so the lower dpi of the Mustek becomes irrelevant since, after interpolation down to reproduction size, the Mustek’s scan is still more dpi than I need.  For higher resolution scans of photographs and similar items, I’ll still have the Canon, anyway.

Looking at the cost of scanners that can accommodate an a3 size artwork, the Mustek is a bargain.  Since it would normally take me at least a half hour to scan and piece together a single page of comic book art using the Canon (and 1/2 and hour assumes nothing goes wrong — other art always takes longer to scan), the Mustek will save me a huge amount of time when you multiply that by many pages.  Tests for color and sharpness look fine so far.

This was my x-mas present.