CZUR Book & Document Scanner with Smart OCR for Mac and Windows

I've only had this for a day, so I may have to update this review as I use it more. Assuming something doesn't break right away, I've played with it enough to declare it VERY USEFUL, a huge leap forward in technology. Perhaps even a 'revolution' in my way of life ;) I read books from the 1800's that are long out of print, not available anywhere except maybe ONE lending library if I'm lucky. I also like to scan individual pages out of a thick music score when I'm traveling. Has worked well in both those cases on my test runs. In fact, scanning with this device has made easy what was before sometimes impossible. Seems like a great way to scan handwritten notes too, though I've not used it for that yet. What I ESPECIALLY like: - I can scan books, sheet music, etc that are lying flat on my desk. The 'autoscan' feature activates after pages have been flipped, so you can multitask and just flip pages when you're ready. It waits for you while you vacuum or whatever. I put a weight inside the 'thumb glove' to keep pages open while I'm away after flipping. Scan quality was excellent on all things I tried so far. - When not in use, I now use the scanner as THE lamp for my desk area-- it illuminates my entire work space quite evenly. They even provided 2 additional USB-rechargeable portable LED desk lamps -- a MOST pleasant surprise -- better than any I've bought on the market. - The OCR and PDF work sufficiently well for me. The page curvature elimination works very well also. The 'thumbprints' from holding the pages down sometimes don't get edited out completely; but this doesn't bother me too much. I might eventually find out what's wrong on those pages where it hasn't worked. So I gave it 5 stars despite some 'rough edges' which are as follows: - documentation is very minimal and incomplete, so you've got to figure a lot of stuff out on your own by just trying things. - installing on windows requires running the app with admin privileges, a pain. They explicitly say in the provided documentation (such as it is) that it runs only under windows not MAC, but I haven't tried obtaining MAC Software which is rumored to be available online. I have computers that run everything, so I'm OK with using it on windows for now. Linux would be my #1 choice. - GUI is very barebones and primitive, but gets the job done. I personally don't require a lot of polish in a GUI as long as I can do what I want. - When OCR-ing a book, you get blocks of text interspersed with headers, which I suppose is to be expected. I'm after text and almost never care about photos. I'm a decent python programmer and so can post-process headers out. Also, I don't like how OCR goes to *.doc files by default; I usually prefer working with straight text in this context, and the intermediate 'doc' files will require some thought for use in batch processing. All in all though, to sum up in one word: spectacular! Kudos to the developers.

This is impressive. I first wanted something like this when Google worked on their Library of Congress project around 2007 or so. I have tens of thousands of documents that I've been wanting to digitize so that I can get rid of the physical stacks. Various books too. This product absolutely does what it's supposed to do. Out of the box, this is an impressive display. I would say their packaging rivals that of Apple products (of which I also use). It's slick, solid, well-presented, and gives a good feeling of quality. I would say that hardware wise, that quality delivers. The unit is solid, easy to use, quick to assemble, and easy to store. The only thing I found a little iffy is the extra light. It's absolutely useful and while I think they did a great job with the design, the light is held in place with a magnetic rectangle lock (very similar to the power cord on a MacBook). Because the light is being pulled by gravity and is a little heavier, it can come off with just a little force. Again, not a huge deal, but it's my only complaint with the hardware. There is a foot pedal and hand pedal that allow you to scan without touching the scan area. That in itself is really convenient and functional. The software is good, but definitely leaves some features to be desired. I noticed that the Fujitsu version of this allows multiple items to be laid on the black cloth and processed individually. This device doesn't seem to allow for that. The multi-page gets off from time to time and I'll have to toy with it in those cases. As a designer and engineer, there are a number of software features that I could envision being pretty easy to build into the software. I also don't feel that the algorithm that "blends in" the thumb holders is very strong. It works, but they could definitely improve upon this significantly. I was also a little frustrated having to upgrade my version of OS X to use their scanner software. I was only half a version behind and I just can't understand what functionality of the newest OS X release they use that would warrant that. So it took me some time out of the box before I could use it since I had to upgrade my entire machine, but it's been running smoothly since. If you have a lot of documents or books that you want to scan, I would highly advise this. If you have a ton of photos, unless I'm mistaken and there IS a way to do multiple scans at once, you might consider their competitor. It's more expensive, but that one feature would save me a TON of time with my scanning process. I've had it for 2 days and have already scanned over 3,000 documents - so yea, it's pretty fast.

I returned this item. It was considerably slower in operation than I expected. The software was a pain to install and use, and it did not work very well as claimed at removing curvature and finger images. A great idea, but not executed well enough. If it were, it would definitely fill a bog need in the marketplace. Consumer scanners really are WAY too slow.

1）You can see from the photos that the packaging design is fashionable and you don't have to worry about damaging your goods in transit. The problem with it is that it's too big. A computer box is not this big. 2）It has a lot of attachments, an extension scan button, scan pedal. My favorite is the side light. Because the side lights solve the problem of reflections from books, I took a picture and you can compare the pictures. The front one is lit by sidelights and the back one is lit by overhead lights. 3）The official data shows a 1.5-second scan per page. This can't be done in practice because it takes more time to turn the page and adjust the position. I scanned 30 pages, took about 4 minutes and averaged 8-10 seconds a page of objective data. But it's still much faster than other scanners. ( I talk about book scanning only) 4) Automatic adjustment is powerful. I purposely chose a very thick and very small book to scan. I intentionally scanned the first 20 pages. This means that the book curves a lot when it's scanned. The result is shown in the figure. It perfectly adjusts the curvature of the book so that it feels flat. 5）One of his faults is that it's too big.It takes up a lot of space on the desk.Please refer to the photo for the specific measurement size. 6）The worst thing is that it gives you a DVD. You read that right. Yes, it's a DVD. It's hard to imagine how many computers come with DVD-ROM in this era. This DVD contains the software installer. You should understand how important DVD-ROM is to you. (luckily my computer is old enough.) 7）When you install it, it asks you for key-code. This is a very old anti-piracy method. Don't worry about the number at the bottom of your scanner, below the bar code.I've been looking for it for a long time

I am a Med student and we need to read A LOT... I usually just buy second-hand books or borrow them from the library, but the scanning process takes forever. One day I found this scanner on FB, so my roommate and I decided to buy one and share. It arrived pretty soon and came with a large box. No assembling was needed. We followed the instructions: download the software from czur.com and check the instruction video on their website. It did take me a while to figure out how to use it, but after trying, I think it’s pretty handy. It scans super fast, and only took half hour for one book, basically as quickly as taking pictures. I use the foot pedal so that I can spare my hands to press the book. Pros: 1.The flatten curve and finger erasing function work surprisingly well (as I saw some previous comments about it), making the page much more comfortable to read. 2.The scan output is in JPG format, but you can select them all at once to convert into PDF, so that is ok. 3.The thing I like most is that I can save all the PDF images to my Kindle, which has been a great help! 4.The OCR function works well too, in which way I can transfer the JPG files into Word documents for easy editing. Cons: 1.You do need to go through the instruction guide or video to figure out how to use it properly. 2.When scanning reflective materials, the exposure was hard to adjust. The customer service sent us a free LED light to solve the problem. As long as I turn off the other lights and use the single LED light they sent me, the images come out fine. After all, I think it’s worth to buy, and very convenient as a book scanner. Just make sure you spend some time learning how it works. Besides, the customer service has been a great support and you can reach them from their website.

I don't normally write reviews, but this product warrants positive feedback. It is simply one of the coolest things I have purchased online in the last few years. It totally works as advertised. I have read some of the negative reviews and I am not sure what those folks are doing that caused their respective problems. The packaging is great and the setup took me like 5 minutes (really that fast). I am using Windows 7 for this device so that may be something to pay attention too. I installed the software directly from the company's website rather than whatever was in the box. It all seems pretty simple to follow the quick setup guide and get started. For my purposes, I want a document/book scanner versus a picture scanner or something else that doesn't really seem to fit the design concept of this product. It's basically an overhead camera that takes pictures of whatever you lay down in front of it. As far as how well the product works. I scanned 7 books today in less than 4 hours. For example (I timed it because I was blown away with the speed) I scanned a 194 page book in 22 minutes. What makes this device fast is that it scans first and then after you are done with the book, you can decide to OCR to pdf or word... or just keep the images. The ocr process obviously adds some time to the overall project time, but I'd say that book was completely saved in a word file within another 10 minutes. I also used the autoscan feature and it was perfect as well. With autoscan, I did a 300 page book and the software was intuitive enough to know when I had finally turned the page and got everything ready for the next scan/picture. So at this point, I'd say this is a great product and great experience. If anything changes I'll update my review.

If you are new to digitizing a book, be aware of time use expectations: The major time consumption in digitizing is NOT the scan time, it is the cleanup time. This will depend on the quality and sophistication of the original and how good you want the book to look and what device you want to read the book on. Old books or books with lots of tables, illustrations or symbols (like math, polytonic Greek, extensive footnoting) are likely to produce marginal results that require extensive cleanup. The scanning might take 12 minutes, the cleanup might take 12 hours. If you anticipate commercial distribution, it could take several days. Your expectation and usage plans make the difference. If all you want is readability of skewed pages and no searchability on a desktop PC, CZUR will deliver quickly. Most e-ink readers like Kindle, Kobo, Nook, etc will do very poorly with a pdf file and much better with epub or mobi searchable formats. Searchable also means speakable, the text-to-speech feature of readers will function as expected only when documents are in OCR format. It is much easier (and less desirable) to achieve a non-searchable image view than a searchable OCR view depending on who will use the scanned output and how professional you want it to look. The auto-repositioning of images feature of CZUR has limited accuracy and if you want clean image based pages that look straight and well marginated to the human eye, you will need to hand crop and rotate the images. This takes time. The CSUR will correct the rotation of pages to within two or three degrees of straightness, the offset is easily visible when it is present. The type of layered pdf file where you can both see the original page image and simultaneously search the underlying textual characters is a format beneath it is not generated by the CZUR software. That layered format is the quick and dirty way that the google book project and high end unattended robotic digitizers achieve fast results. No human supervised spell check is performed and consequently hundreds, even thousands of errors remain hidden from the person reading the book. You only see those errors if you can export the document into .epub or .docx format to pass it through software with slow human mediated spell checking. OCR machine spell checking often misrenders the images it sees. The image of a distorted "O" may render as (] or (j ,may render as "O". Italicized letters like b,h, rn and cl are especially vulnerable to confused interpretation. Letters or words may be randomly italicized or bolded by mistake. The presence of page numbers or page headers/footers may interfere with your intended purpose and may have to be manually removed. An index set in extra small type (eg 6pt) may end up as mostly human readable, but chopped up in a confusing format and randomly misspelled. Many of your lower case "e" letters can turn into "c". Expectations realized with CZUR scanner: High scan rate Better than average resolution A set of JPEG files that may be loaded into other higher quality OCR software Thumbprint removal happens most of the time, but is quirky--very unpredictable and the erasure eats into the page past the actual size of the thumb image sometimes chopping into words by removing leading or trailing letters. Virtually non-existant documentation Expectations N OT realized with image CZUR output: Uniform margins Straight untilted pages that are not distracting to the eye Quality rendering of half-tone photos Automatic contrast detection may create background color drift Expectations NOT realized with OCRd CZUR output: Quality rendering of half-tone photos Rapid OCR and accurate human mediated post processing The amazon product listing mentions a bundle with ABBYY which was not present with the shipped unit. No matter how you slice it, book digitizing takes time and the better you want it to look, the more TIME it takes. In some ways the CZUR is a revolutionary packaged device for high book scan rates at a consumer-oriented price. But it does not quicken the time-consuming postprocessing aspect of digitization production. If you already own a very high-resolution 20MP camera you might achieve a similar outcome with third party software like booksorber. The absence of any meaningful documentation on such a sophisticated product is inexcusable and reason enough to return it in my view. On the other hand if your computer skills are self-taught by trial and error, this may be just the product for you. So in the end, just how fussy are you when you read the printed page, ie the distortion distraction factor? How much mental and physical energy are you willing to invest keeping things tidy? This review is based on personally digitizing several challenging books, but just doing a hardbound novel would be a piece of cake, doing poetry or a mass market paperback is a bear. My sense of this software [from a former developer] is that it is still at beta level, not enough features and definitely not up to an ADA certification audit, the type is too small and the contrast is loo low unless you have young eyeballs. To my senior eyeballs the screen has an uncomfortable washed out fuzzy look and is functionally at less than ten percent what you would find in the freebie Paint program that comes free with windows. There is a similar order of magnitude difference between the free copy of Omnipage that comes with a low end Canon flatbed scanner and the inability CZUR to allow for human mediated corrections. Sometimes the automatic image "correction" makes the image worse rather than better producing a very wavy baseline effect for lines of text. Sales claim:"Quickly book to ebook (Less than 3 mins for a 200 pages book)" After some practice, I would not attempt to scan a 200 page book in less than 30mins with this product just for the scan alone for a simple book. If you try the CZUR ET16 you will have a chance to answer such issues from personal experience. If you do decide to take the plunge, here are some tips: There are lots of youtube ET16 tutorials & tips better than the ones on the CZUR site, like those from D&H Innovation & John Willis & E-Z photo scan. If you are editing an image and want to rotate it, you can press the right and left arrow keys on the keyboard to go clockwise and counterclockwise by one degree in the rotate tool.. Make sure the book is dead center in the viewfinder, serious parallax distortions result from items placed near an edge because the camera is so close to the page. If you accidentally scan the same pages twice, you can just delete the extra images without have to renumber anything, the same is true of deleting blank pages. Some users that digitize glossy pages prefer a light shield box or shield for better results, others do their scanning in a dark room, lighting can be critical for the reflections from coated stock. Interacting with "support" is fast and easy, their reply will be "Thanks for your question, watch our videos several times, have a nice day." Assume you will end up buying either OmniPage Pro or ABBYY Pro if you expect to do any serious work, both can import folders full of images from the CZUR. Also assume you will have to make several cleanup passes for top notch results, one for human-mediated OCR, one for duplicate or missing pages, one for a word processor spell check, one for page aesthetics including margination and justification, and a set of searches of OCR misread trigger words like arid,arc, riot, sonic, clay, yon, ina, docs, tip, nay, and hut. And of course the final test is actually reading the book for ugly surprises, even if all you do is read one or two chapters you will learn funky things that will repeat all through the book that you can search for. As pretty as the packaging is, the bottom line costwise is that this item will set you back about twice what I am willing to pay considering the very low cost of a Sony 20 mp cameras and the weak software. The unit was returned until the price/product usability becomes more realistic. Other options are way more attractive to me. A user friendly product would require a total rewrite and a clear, complete manual.

After reading the reviews of the Fujitsu scansnap sv600, I decided to give this Czur scanner a try and I absolutely like it. Yes, it’s from China and the user manual is not in proper English, but the setup process was very simple and straight forward. The scanning software is also very simple with only three main operations, Scan, Archive, and Bulk, which are used in scanning the page, running OCR and processing the scanned ages in bulk. Without disassemble or roughly handle the book, scanning a thick book is just a matter of turning the pages with the book opened facing up, and the built-in software will correct and straighten the curved lines automatically, the result was pretty amazing. Compared to scan one page at a time facing down on a flatbed copy machine, this little handy scanner does the job much faster and easier and best of all there is no need to do any manual editing. So far I managed to scan over a dozen books without any problem. I haven’t tried the cloud scanning option yet, but already felt my money was well spent. If anyone who needs to do some serious scanning, the Czur scanner is definitely a good choice and I highly recommend it.

Best product ever, I scanned 86 pages of book at low quality, low size, it took 2 mb of space and best quality at the lowest settings. Go for it. Thumb cots only auto-removed when two page setting is applied. 86 page took 2-3 minutes, as I am a new to this.

Utilisé dans le cadre de la numérisation de ma bibliothèque personnelle, je l'ai testé sur des gros pavés (certains ayant 2000 pages, d'autres avec des reliures collées, donc peu "flexibles") et tout ce que l'on peut dire, c'est que ce numériseur assure grave ! L'aplatissement est de très bonne qualité, tout juste peut-on remarquer (parfois) ici et là de très légères ondulations des lignes de texte, mais il faut être très tatillon ! Le logiciel fourni est aussi d'excellente facture, simple d'utilisation et rapide. Je n'ai pas testé la fonction OCR (j'utilise Abby Finereader), mais on peut présumer que ça sera d'un très bon niveau puisque CZur embarque la technologie... de ce fournisseur. Les outils de complément (pédale pour pied, bouton déclencheur, éclairage latéral) sont très utiles, de même que la numérisation auto (via le logiciel) qui permet de gagner un temps considérable. Bref, du matos QUI TIENT SES PROMESSES, et qui justifie pleinement son prix.

Yo lo utilizo para escanear fotos y texto, y puedo decir que cumple sobradamente con las expectativas. Es rápido, sencillo de utilizar, el software de instalación funciona perfectamente en Windows 10 (mejor descargarlo desde la página de Czur, el manual incluye el enlace directo). Todo el material que viene con el escáner, está muy presentado en su caja, un poco voluminosa para guardar, pero muy útil al venir acolchada para la protección del escáner y las luces auxiliares. Muy satisfecho con la compra.

The CZUR ET16 Plus Book Scanner is the solution for faster scanning than the traditional flat-bed scanner. Once you become familiar with it it really can save a great deal of time with high-quality results - you choose your DPI. The LED lighting options are very flexible to cope with glare too. If you belong to an orchestra, for example, you can scan all your music into an app - for fast retrieval and page-turning (via a foot pedal!) in an appropriate app - not to mention a very compact portable solution and 'electronic' music stand. If you are a teacher/lecturer or museum librarian - this must be the answer for access for your students and researchers. It's very fast with desk and foot buttons if you have to scan, say, a book. Slower for, say different music sheets - but still fast. The clever finger gadgets hold down the pages (even though the software straightens out 'curves') and then automatically removes them from your scan!

I do not have tons of stuffs to scan, but Covid-19 has make me bring your tutoring sessions online (on Zoom), and a new management of what materials I should pre-scanned, so that I work out chapters, worksheets with my students Online. But sometimes, I would need to get something scanned quickly and make them into PDFs, and my normal Multi-function printer/scanner takes a bit too slow, and I still have to do some backend work, to clean up the scans, rotate alternate pages (if I scanned a book), etc. The Czur ET16 Plus allows me to get the job done in a fraction of the time I used to take, and it's quiet, no moving parts, only me flipping the pages, step on the foot paddle to activate scan/capture when I'm ready to. Totally happy with the purchase. Also, when I decided to make the purchase, I got the product from the supplier in Singapore, in 2 days, with Amazon Prime. If you in need of scanning a lot, books or papers, or needs scanning to done quickly, this is the product I strongly recommend.