Product Reviews

Plustek's SmartOffice PL806 is an A4 flatbed scanner with a 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF). With a maximum optical resolution of only 600dpi, it's designed for scanning and archiving office documents rather than more creative home projects. There's no transparency backlight, so it can't scan film originals.

The PL806 is a rather bulky scanner, arranged widthways with its lid hinged at the back. Its ADF is supported by two clip-in plastic struts, both of which had shot out of our test unit and needed to be refitted. The front panel has five short-cut buttons, for one-touch scanning to applications such as the supplied optical character recognition (OCR) software, or for sending direct copies via your PC to a printer. It's easy to open the lid, and the extending hinge design allows you to close the top flat on a thick original such as a book.

By loading multiple sheets into the ADF, you can make an automated scan of multiple pages. Few image-editing programs will support this, but the PL806 comes with Presto! PageManager 6, which does.

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It doesn't have a particularly slick user interface, but we found our way around it after a little trial and error. We scanned 15 A4 pages that were printed on both sides. The PL806 scans one side at a time, so we re-fed the pages through. At 300dpi, each set of 15 scans took around two minutes and 20 seconds, but PageManager has no option to interleave the results and restore the correct page order. You can do this manually before exporting the results to a single PDF, but it would be time-consuming for a longer document.

The PL806 is quick and its scan quality is more than adequate for capturing office documents. Exposure was even across the whole of our test A4 scans and the captured colours were faithful to the original. At the scanner's maximum resolution we could see that images weren't perfectly focused, but at more typical resolutions of 75, 150 and 300dpi they appeared crisp enough. Surprisingly, given the scanner's target market, it produced a very good 600dpi scan of our test photo.

PageManager includes a de-skew option to correct the alignment of any pages that don't pass perfectly straight through the scanner, but it misread one straight page and rotated it by about 30 degrees. The documents it exported to PDF format were quite low resolution and had some visible compression artefacts.

This concern aside, the SmartOffice PL806 is a useful document scanner costing less than faster, duplex-scanning rivals such as Fujitsu's ScanSnap range. However, it's about the same price as an entry-level, ADF-equipped laser multifunction peripheral, which would be a better choice if you're also looking for a printer.