Hello Mary, Eileen, and Others, As far as I can tell from my reading of sites like the reader reports section of macintouch.com, Plustek support of scanner drivers for the Mac peaked around 2010 when they released those beta versions for Lion, and nothing has happened since. This is also borne out by product reviews at sites like Amazon.
One of the reasons that many people use VueScan on the Mac, apart from the support for multi-page scanning, is that Hamrick Software manages to support many old devices, or in some cases even devices that were originally designed to work under Windows, where the manufacturers provide only minimal driver support. So for these users the main value of the VueScan software is the ability to continue using devices that they already have, instead of having to go out and buying new scanners simply because there is no driver support for these models, or because it becomes extremely difficult to locate working drivers, especially for updates in the operating system. However, there are limits to what the developer can do in the absence of any support from the manufacturer since the device drivers are specific to the product. (This statement also applies to ABBYY's ability to support theses scanners on the Mac, as well as VueScan's ability to do so.) A check of Amazon user reviews of the Plustek 3800 is not hopeful. I'll paste in a review from June 15, 2012 titled "Good luck finding scanner software support" This review is from: Plustek OpticBook 3800 Book Scanner (Office Product) The scanner itself is fine, provided it is on an absolutely level surface (otherwise it will freeze and produce a "scree" sound until you manually turn it off). What it has over other scanners is how close the scanner bed is to the side, so that you can scan books along the spine without having to break the spine and hold it down with your hands. That said, the real problem comes when trying to use Opticbook 3800 with other software. I use an iMac 10.7, and while you can get the Opticbook image capture driver from Plustek's webpage, this still does not allow for support in Vuescan or any other software program I tried (and I spent hours on this). You can use the native software, but it is rather buggy. I lost scans on several occasions because the software crashes. It feels immature (in fact, I believe it is still in beta). It did work through image capture on the Mac, but this is rather unsatisfactory. Having to hit the scan button each time you want to scan a page gets rather old. It is too bad there is not an option to autoscan (hence, why it is so sad that it is not supported by Vuescan, which has this feature and rocks-it also doesn't crash). In short, I would send it back in a heartbeat-if there were any other book scanners in existence under the thousands of dollars range. Until then, I'll have to keep it and hope for some serious software upgrades. Update: I decided to return this product. It simply felt cheap, the native software is atrocious (as others note if you do a www search to investigate further), and it simply doesn't work with Vuescan, at least on the mac. I've also been in email discussions with Plustek tech support as well as the creator of Vuescan, who has been trying to get it to work; both have been unsuccessful. HTH. Cheers, Esther On Dec 5, 2013, at 9:15 AM, Mary Otten wrote: > Hi Eileen, > Did this tech guy at the Plustek headquarters indicate that there are > supposed to be drivers for Mac and the 3800? That would be interesting. Last > I looked, there weren't any such on the Plustek website. I wish they would do > full-fledged drivers that would support third-party programs, not just their > button manager, which under Snow Leopard on those betas was not accessible. > Mary > > > Sent from my iPhone > > On Dec 5, 2013, at 9:54 AM, Eileen Misrahi wrote: > >> Hello Folks, >> >> I contacted the US office here in California regarding installing the >> Plustek 3600 on the Mac OS operating system. What I learned was that the >> model 3800 replaced the 3600 and that the 3600 wouldn't be supported any >> further than 10.7, which is a beta. The tech support individual will send an >> email to the corporate office in Taipei to see if they would be so kind to >> create another beta version for 10.8. I indicated that there are other >> visually impaired individuals who are using this scanner and would prefer to >> install it on their Mac computers. He indicated that the response time from >> the corporate office is about 2-3 days. When I receive an email from tech >> support, I will post again. It wasn't the answer I wanted to hear, but at >> least this guy was willing to try. I also inquired if the drivers for the >> 3800 would run the 3600, but the firmware is different and is on the >> motherboard of the 3800. >> >> Kind regards, >> eileen > <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to mac-access@mac-access.net You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at either the list's own dedicated web archive: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> or at the public Mail Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/mac-access@mac-access.net/>. Subscribe to the list's RSS feed from: <http://www.mail-archive.com/mac-access@mac-access.net/maillist.xml> As the Mac Access Dot Net administrators, we do our very best to ensure that the Mac-Access E-Mal list remains malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free. However, this should in no way replace your own security strategy. We assume neither liability nor responsibility should something unpredictable happen. 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