CZUR Shine Ultra Pro Reality Check

My experience with this scanner was a mixed bag. The manufacturer's claim of flattening the curvature is only partially accurate and the claim of being able to scan a 300-page book in 10 minutes would only be possible if you do not care about the quality of the scan.
The end result was I needed to chop the book up in order to get a usable scan (which is what I was trying to avoid when I bought the scanner).
Even with the book disassembled, there were noticeable angles to the text which needed to be corrected and I had to use third party software to make those corrections because CZUR software does not have this capability.
I contacted CZUR support to see if I purchased one of the more expensive scanners would I get better results? Their reply was that all of the scanners used the same processing software.

[@davebing11]

Yes, The Czur ET24 Pro has exactly the same problems. In reality the Plustek Opticbook 4800 (which is a flatbed scanner) is actually faster even with a calimed speed of 3.5 seconds per page which is really 8 seconds per page. As for curvature, the Plustek scans all the way to one edge of the glass (which is where you place the binding and can handle a 800 page thick book just fine. And there is no secondary processing required for perfectly undistorted scans. It took over 10 videos to figure out how to use the CZUR workflow and it still requires third party SW to clean up the distortions which negates any advertised speed advantages. To scan 60 page magazines required placing a sheet of glass over the magazine to flatten it and also required using side lights to avoid the glare from the overhead lamps in the glass. The stapled binding of the magazine is much worse than a book binding for creating non-linear distortions. If you dont care about scan quality, the CZUR is ok and fast. If you want good scan quality, the Plustek is actually faster, even at 8 seconds per page. The Plustek has a major problem with buggy SW which forced me to scan in 60 page sections due to random SW lockups killing the entire scan up to that point) (and Yes I was running a high end engineering workstation with ECC memory as the host for both).

[@jamespenuel9348]

I bought this scanner to scan several old books in Norwegian. I had to set up special lighting (two ringlights for smooth lighting). The single light source on the scanner itself causes way too much glare. The software did a good job of correcting the curvature and eliminating the images of my thumbs holding the pages down. Correct alignment is crucial to getting good scans. The process was somewhat tedious, but I did get good images which I then ran through OmniPage Pro for OCR, and then used Google translate to convert to English. Processing was pretty fast with my HP laptop. Aside from book scanning, this device is really not particularly useful. I find it much faster to use a flatbed or my old Fujitsu fi6130Z for routine scanning.

[@MrWTBlock]

Thanks for the feedback. Does the Omnipage Pro OCR work better than the CZUR Integrated OCR?

[@jamespenuel9348]

@@MrWTBlock Didn't try it. OmniPage has multiple language settings and I used Norwegian.

[@sehuno]

good job!!thanks!!

[@a_betancourth]

Would you instead recommend a flatbed scanner for scanning books?

[@MrWTBlock]

A lot depends on your goal. I was trying to reproduce these books for republication on Kindle and I could not accept any distortions. For my purposes I had to cut the books up so that I could flatten the pages.