I love my Opticbook 3600 and will likely make my next scanner some variety of A3 plustek. I love the color of the raw scans.
The edge feature certainly is a book saver (and you are right that care can be taken with how you hold a spine), but I'd note it's not a panacea for books with tight margins.
The book edge has other nice uses, too, though, in that you can scan many types of books quickly and with no spine shadow.
The downside to me of at least my opticbook is how often I have to clean the inside of the glass or more annoyingly the bulb. Usually compressed air will do the trick for the bulb (you will notice green streaks through your scan hairs and whatnot have clung to the bulb jacking the saturation will help identify these) but sometimes I'll use a little swab or optical lens cloth with maybe a little alcohol. Of course, I scan a lot of very brittle pulp and my scan area sometimes looks like a snowglobe. A second downside might be that the customer service is a bit ghosty and that a new machine is often a better solution than repair. But scanners including myself keep going back when the time comes for a new machine.
As for Vuescan, it's pretty amazing how many scanners use it with different operating systems and older scanners. Careful, though, it's not a universal problem solver for scanners that won't work on newer computers
Loving the scans, Dynamo!
