Great review Steve. I believe they were thinking "Let compress it to JPEG for preview and everything else, now lets save as an uncompressed TIFF.. hold on a minute..."
Purchased this to “scan” vinyl record covers and CDs. Because record covers are larger finding a flatbed just isn’t going to happen. I’m very unhappy with the results. Images are distorted, pixelated and blurry. For a $600 price tag and a “24MP camera” this one falls short. While the auto scan feature is nice. I can achieve similar results & better quality with a light box, Bluetooth shutter and an iPhone 13 Pro Max. I will be returning this asap.
Yeah, the image results are really disappointing. Any recent iPhone can do a great job, someone should make similar page/book detection software for phones, with made a laser add-on for page curves.
Totally agree w @Mac84 - what is available to harness iPhone for high quality scanning? - books of music; photo prints, hard & paper-back books into high res. Searchable PDF format? Must be some DIY genius out there:)
@@Mac84 thanks for the color example.. they need to get to a more 1080p true color feel and no fake boarders in software for this to be worth it for me. Id love to be able to scan an omnibus comic/graphic novel for digital form...
Very helpful review at exactly the right nerd level for my archive purposes! Looking for a book and magazine scanner, and definitely prefer to scan once. For my small non-profit budget hard to justify the $600+ price I’d want higher quality, so maybe just to get started I’ll buy the Aura for OCR purposes on smaller jobs, like capturing select pages from a book and odd size magazines, which is a huge production on my flatbed, and hold back the full out archiving jobs to when the price/performance equation improves. Thanks again!
Thank you for posting this review! I'm investigating book scanners at the moment and this one was on my radar...WAS! That's some pretty awful image quality for $500+ especially since my $50 flat bed's quality blows it outta the water. Fancy not being able to change those settings too. Going to start looking at the Fujitsu ones instead hopefully they have better camera sensors and software! The quality reminds me an awful lot of the commercial 8mm scanners (wolverine/reelz etc etc) which all seem to use the same low quality camera sensor and locked down software - sure they'll do they job...but the quality is pretty dire.
I'm glad I was able to provide you with an honest look at these. Funny you mention the Wolverine, the community have found some software hacks to get better quality out of the built in camera sensors, which sometimes are great, but are limited by silly firmware. Good luck!
I gave up on the auto-cropping feature after about a week of use and went with the fill screen. Its more important to get the ambient lighting just right.
Thanks for a honest review, I was about to order this scammer.) No tiffs, but jpgs converted out of the video stream? No way guys, you're kidding. It is a big surprize they do not meet standard demands and expectations of potential users.
Thank you for a proper review of this camera setup. You correctly declared the supply of the machine and gave it a good balanced test. I was curious how badly it would do with book spines etc. I can see it being useful for, (a very few,) people who scan in books containing nothing but plain text for Gutenberg type work otherwise it is just plain bad. It would be bad for £50 let alone £500. I have just bought a cheap Canon that is much better even if it does look like it'll break if I breath to hard near it and my old Epson 1670 was also much better.
Thank you. Yes, it is only useful for plain text and nothing fancy - even then it struggles with spines and page edges at times. I was really disappointed by the quality of the camera and the odd filter they put over everything. For the price, it's a real shame.
The 3 row laser scanner to dewarp the book pages and the lights alone seem woth the 50 Pounds so I don't think that's fair. It looks to me like this is held back by oversimplistic software (and maybe lack of proper low level api and documentation).
@@kwinzman I agree with you that comments should be reasonable but I believe my comment to be fair. For all practical home and SoHo purposes this scanner is not worth having. If you want to OCR a plain book then a 'phone program like 'text fairy' will suffice. For scanning magazine and newspaper articles a flatbed is better and substantially cheaper. My old Epson was decent for scanning negatives which this expensive machine can not do and even I, a home user, do not think it acceptable that it only captures in Jpeg format. As for serious archival use, as I said for plain text book scanning, at speed, ok that's real but very niche. For other large items like pictures or maps Jpeg is utterly unacceptable for archival use. (SOME home users might accept this.) True most images online are offered as Jpeg but the originals will mostly be Tif. For really good book scanning an edge less scanner should be used. Why either of the big manufacturers don't sell an edge Lees A4 or A3 is a mystery to me, despite having just bought a new scanner if they brought out a edge less A3 scanner at a fair price I'd be deeply tempted. Alas the only two I know of are sold at an outrageous price. - The only extra they offer is one side scans right to the (very thin) edge which is flat. I agree that changing the software might make it useable or even good but that software isn't supplied and the hardware on its own is just a lump of plastic and metal. [If you haven't tried it text capture with your 'phone' is surprisingly good.]
I've been an owner of this product close to 1 year. In my view, the software is the weakest link to an otherwise fine product. Many early adapters of this product on Facebook sent ALOT of constructive comments for improving the software to the company but after 1 year nothing has been implemented despite company comments they would improve the software. Until they improve this aspect of the product, I CAN'T "enthusiastically recommend" the ET 24 Pro to everyone yet. Overall, I am happy "enough" with the product (agree w/ you whole heartedly about expecting MORE for the $$ they charge) but my needs are simply a digital copy of the books / magazines / paper documents I want on my computer / archival setup for quick review. People desiring quality digital copies of pictures and high level reproductions should look elsewhere.
Great review Just in time for me Like you I have and old flatbed scanner, and its taking me ages to scan some books So I thought I'd get one of these CZUR ET24s But then I thought is it really just a digital camera - which we all have in some form. Eg I have a midrange Nikon Z6 So I will be pleased to watch your video
If you watched the video you’d know I tried this. This only slightly reduces glare. Even off camera, in tests with a pretty dark basement, it had trouble detecting pages and cropping things well.
@@skat4035I want to get this for scanning books would you recommend given what he’s saying about the compression ? Please respond I have so many books to scan and need my life to be easier 😭
I've owned one of these for some time now, and have learned how to manipulate the flaky software under most circumstances. The auto-cropping feature requires massive fiddling which pretty much negates the time saved by using a camera as the image capture, versus scanning it. Very frustrating. Also frustrating is the fact that a lot of the options and settings, such as the "Hint Tone" (check this box and it'll beep to tell you that it's okay to turn to the next page) and exposure setting, revert back to the defaults when you quit out of the application. It's also maddening how when you process a book for export, it always hides and moves the process to the background. Probably the most irritating thing about it, is when scanning facing pages, it will do fine for 10 pages, then it'll start totally skewing images, like you experienced during your review. You then have to waste more time going back and editing to correct your book before exporting it. I've found if you manually create two page capture boxes and just line your book up so as to fit each page in its own box, it works flawlessly. The finger cots help with positioning and mitigating the humps and the gutter in the middle, but the software doesn't edit them out perfectly, there are ghosts of them left behind in all images. I find I mainly use the side lights, and mine started blinking after about 10 months. I emailed tech support, and while they did send me a replacement set of side lights, the process was not a fun one. It's good at one thing: scanning black and white books and implementing OCR as searchable PDFs. This is pretty much what I bought the thing for, and when I bought it, it was on sale, so I feel pretty good about the purchase, despite it being a one-trick pony.
I don't save the scan as a searchable PDF because the software does a poor job keeping the file down a manageable size. I save any scans as a regular pdf and let another software program convert it to a searchable pdf file (which is noticeably smaller than what CZUR's program will do if you rely on them for a searchable pdf file).
@@Leo-lp4zh agreed...if you check the pop-up choice for 'keep original image', it'll output a rather massive file. I've found I can make the output file size a bit more manageable by selecting the 'medium' PDF Quality choice, (which is in the same dialog as the first pop-up I mentioned) but yeah, it's still bloaty. Which apps do you use to process your images into searchable PDFs, if you don't mind my asking?
@@jasonatkin6787 I have Devonthink for Mac (Pro edition) which comes with the Abbyy Finereader OCR engine. The funny thing is CZUR says they use Abbyy also but b/c of the big discrepancy betw/ both company's readable pdf files, I'm led to believe that Devonthink has a more robust version of the Abbyy engine. If you are on a Windows platform, I've heard good things about Scan Tailor Advanced but never tried it on my Windows machine.
There are others in a professional class range that do far better, sadly they’re all well over $1,000. Because of the post-processing done on the camera level with this device I cannot recommend it. You’re better off using a phone on a stand.
@@Mac84 got it, thank you so much for your indepth video review, really helped me deciding. I'll stick with my phone for the time being as you suggested. 👍
@@Mac84 Thanks for that reply! Could you name a scanner in next highest price category that has configurable firmware level postprocessing or compression that can be turned off and that you do recommend?
I had this in my cart about to purchase before I found this review. Now I'm second guessing due to the JPEG compression ordeal. I do a lot of archiving and knowing that the raw source is actually lossy is a big let down. In the past I have done some DIY setups using a Nikon D7000 camera with a custom tripod and interval shooting. Now I question if that was still better quality than what I may get on this. Hmm. Thanks for the review!
I’m glad this helped you make your decision. I feel the same way about the raw source being unobtainable with this product, very disappointing. If you find another solution you like, let me know!
@@Mac84 I was just going to ask if you had any alternatives either 😆. It's tough for the price range to find anything other than this company's products...
As you and I discussed in-chat during one of Bruce Rayne's streams awhile back, and as you elucidate here, the software UX and UI are both pretty abysmal, especially for something marketed as ostensibly "professional". Admittedly, I purchased their lower-tier "Aura" model, but the software used by each appears to be identical and, indeed, I experienced all of the issues you did here reviewing your "higher-end" ET24. I too am a bit of a perfectionist with this sort of thing, and although much faster than a flatbed scanner, the results are exceedingly poor. And several of the reasons for this (mis-orientations, bad cropping, and AI-mishaps notwithstanding) are due to poor software design rather than the scanner itself. And of course, you have to babysit it way more than I would like, which sort of defeats the purpose. Despite my excitement going in, thinking I would be able to rapidly scan many of the manuals I've collected, it has sat unused in my living room since I first tested it months ago.
Yes, there’s certainly room for improvement. The hardware is only as good as the software allows it to be. So I’m sure both can use tweaking. I will try and use this for scanning large black and white manuals that are not archived. The results are better than not having it scanned at all. But for anything with color images, I think I’d stay clear.
@@Mac84 It's also poor with black and white photographs and illustrations. The camera system simply can't cope with fine detail. If you buy this product to preserve illustrated books and magazines for posterity, those later generations will be disappointed you didn't use a good flatbed scanner for the job.
Yeah, it's likely there to produce "bolder" results and improve the ability of the device's output to look better. It looks like a simple edge enhancement filter. It's a shame you can't turn it, or the AI stuff, off.
I have a cropping problem. Maybe software issue? When scanning a book I center it properly and it crops too much of the first page in the middle and appears on the second page, and on the second page the edge gets cropped too much. Has anyone experienced this? I have tried the adjustments and gets a little better but still not good.
It seems like you should consider redoing this test on a Windows PC. The results might differ. There's a significant lack of a computer application capable of automatically processing smartphone-taken document photos. On PC, there's an option like Scan Tailor, but it involves a lot of manual work. There's also a Java application called Booksorber, but it seems the author has ceased its support.
Much appreciated. JPG is a dealbreaker, no good for digital archiving. I think I'll stick to taking books/magazines apart and using my Fujitsu, regardless of how much work it is to unbind an average book.
If I am spending 500+ bucks on that thing I am expecting no mandatory JPEG compression and configurable postprocessing. This review is now 6 months old. Was that ever resolved with a software update, or it a hardware limitation, or does CZUR simply not care to make an update? Appreciate the review!
This was never resolved. CZUR only reached out asking me to edit my video to remove my critiques, which I refused to do. I would guess if they really wanted to, they could turn off whatever sharpening/filtering function the camera is presenting via a firmware or software update. I certainly would be upset if this was the quality I got from a $600+ USD device.
@@Mac84 "Thanks for reaching out. Due to CZUR scanners only support MJPG stream, so they only can be scanned to JPG format as default. Users need convert scanned JPG images to other formats by manual after scanning." Support reply suggests it's a hardware limitation. They probably don't take individual pictures, but video to do their processing (page flip detection etc). And the (web)-cam that is built-in probably always does JPEG compression to squeeze the data through a USB 2.0(?) link.
It’s funny how they gave you a more direct answer… while I was contacting them for this video they wouldn’t even acknowledge the issue and suggested I reinstall the software.
@@Mac84 Half a year difference and I contacted tech support. Your contact was probably from marketing / creator outreach. At least we got a more useful answer now.
I would say no. If you look at the examples at the end, anything with color it does weird filtering too. I would not recommend this for color magazines, let alone artwork.
I've been able to compare the results of a Czur ET24 Pro scanner with a flatbed scanner. The difference is night and day. My scans with a flatbed scanner (with a CCD sensor) are absolutely razor sharp, the Czur produces blurry lores photographs in comparison.
@@ymmv99 Thanks. This is the info I needed to save me from making a $600 mistake. I will now happily continue to weaken book spines, knowing that flatbed scanners have not yet been surpassed.
only jpeg? that is.. atrocious for a ~600$ scanner. I did have an obvious question.. on the top toolbar there is "Format" in the menu, was there anything there perhaps? I didn't see you messing with the menus/digging into the settings up there much.. The options in the menu screen you were in seemed to be the right one, but sometimes they config things strange. Overall if jpg is the default I would never spend that money on a cheap idea like that, exporting to tiff after loss is horrible lol
Wow that was a bit of a tough review. But its the only one that I have seen that points out those poor features Eg the artifacts and the slightly inaccurate colours I want to use it to scan old history books, mostly text into jpg and then OCR. You did not seem to cover that. Nor did you cover if its a Scanner or a Camera like in your title
Thank you for a genuine honest review. I was going to buy it but for I want to use it for and for $ 520.00 on a black Friday sale, I'm going to pass
Great review Steve. I believe they were thinking "Let compress it to JPEG for preview and everything else, now lets save as an uncompressed TIFF.. hold on a minute..."
Purchased this to “scan” vinyl record covers and CDs. Because record covers are larger finding a flatbed just isn’t going to happen. I’m very unhappy with the results. Images are distorted, pixelated and blurry. For a $600 price tag and a “24MP camera” this one falls short. While the auto scan feature is nice. I can achieve similar results & better quality with a light box, Bluetooth shutter and an iPhone 13 Pro Max. I will be returning this asap.
Yeah, the image results are really disappointing. Any recent iPhone can do a great job, someone should make similar page/book detection software for phones, with made a laser add-on for page curves.
Totally agree w @Mac84 - what is available to harness iPhone for high quality scanning? - books of music; photo prints, hard & paper-back books into high res. Searchable PDF format? Must be some DIY genius out there:)
@@Mac84 I don't know about iPhones, but on Android we have the vFlat app for that.
@@Mac84 thanks for the color example.. they need to get to a more 1080p true color feel and no fake boarders in software for this to be worth it for me. Id love to be able to scan an omnibus comic/graphic novel for digital form...
Very helpful review at exactly the right nerd level for my archive purposes! Looking for a book and magazine scanner, and definitely prefer to scan once. For my small non-profit budget hard to justify the $600+ price I’d want higher quality, so maybe just to get started I’ll buy the Aura for OCR purposes on smaller jobs, like capturing select pages from a book and odd size magazines, which is a huge production on my flatbed, and hold back the full out archiving jobs to when the price/performance equation improves. Thanks again!
I’m glad it was helpful! Best of luck with your archiving projects!
Perfect review. Imperfect product.
Thank you for posting this review! I'm investigating book scanners at the moment and this one was on my radar...WAS! That's some pretty awful image quality for $500+ especially since my $50 flat bed's quality blows it outta the water. Fancy not being able to change those settings too. Going to start looking at the Fujitsu ones instead hopefully they have better camera sensors and software! The quality reminds me an awful lot of the commercial 8mm scanners (wolverine/reelz etc etc) which all seem to use the same low quality camera sensor and locked down software - sure they'll do they job...but the quality is pretty dire.
I'm glad I was able to provide you with an honest look at these. Funny you mention the Wolverine, the community have found some software hacks to get better quality out of the built in camera sensors, which sometimes are great, but are limited by silly firmware. Good luck!
I've decided to take the other route with 8mm scanning, currently building my own using the Raspberry Pi4 + HD Cam :)
Thanks for your honest review.
I gave up on the auto-cropping feature after about a week of use and went with the fill screen. Its more important to get the ambient lighting just right.
Okay so out of all the book scanners, which one is the best?
Thanks for a honest review, I was about to order this scammer.) No tiffs, but jpgs converted out of the video stream? No way guys, you're kidding. It is a big surprize they do not meet standard demands and expectations of potential users.
Thank you for a proper review of this camera setup. You correctly declared the supply of the machine and gave it a good balanced test.
I was curious how badly it would do with book spines etc. I can see it being useful for, (a very few,) people who scan in books containing nothing but plain text for Gutenberg type work otherwise it is just plain bad. It would be bad for £50 let alone £500. I have just bought a cheap Canon that is much better even if it does look like it'll break if I breath to hard near it and my old Epson 1670 was also much better.
Thank you. Yes, it is only useful for plain text and nothing fancy - even then it struggles with spines and page edges at times. I was really disappointed by the quality of the camera and the odd filter they put over everything. For the price, it's a real shame.
The 3 row laser scanner to dewarp the book pages and the lights alone seem woth the 50 Pounds so I don't think that's fair. It looks to me like this is held back by oversimplistic software (and maybe lack of proper low level api and documentation).
This product sells for $600 USD, thus my higher expectations.
@@Mac84 I was talking to the original poster who said it would be bad for £50.
@@kwinzman I agree with you that comments should be reasonable but I believe my comment to be fair. For all practical home and SoHo purposes this scanner is not worth having.
If you want to OCR a plain book then a 'phone program like 'text fairy' will suffice. For scanning magazine and newspaper articles a flatbed is better and substantially cheaper. My old Epson was decent for scanning negatives which this expensive machine can not do and even I, a home user, do not think it acceptable that it only captures in Jpeg format. As for serious archival use, as I said for plain text book scanning, at speed, ok that's real but very niche. For other large items like pictures or maps Jpeg is utterly unacceptable for archival use. (SOME home users might accept this.) True most images online are offered as Jpeg but the originals will mostly be Tif.
For really good book scanning an edge less scanner should be used. Why either of the big manufacturers don't sell an edge Lees A4 or A3 is a mystery to me, despite having just bought a new scanner if they brought out a edge less A3 scanner at a fair price I'd be deeply tempted. Alas the only two I know of are sold at an outrageous price. - The only extra they offer is one side scans right to the (very thin) edge which is flat. I agree that changing the software might make it useable or even good but that software isn't supplied and the hardware on its own is just a lump of plastic and metal.
[If you haven't tried it text capture with your 'phone' is surprisingly good.]
Great review Steve Yes TIF That would help with the Parallax that is induced with. the Laser scanning
I've been an owner of this product close to 1 year. In my view, the software is the weakest link to an otherwise fine product. Many early adapters of this product on Facebook sent ALOT of constructive comments for improving the software to the company but after 1 year nothing has been implemented despite company comments they would improve the software. Until they improve this aspect of the product, I CAN'T "enthusiastically recommend" the ET 24 Pro to everyone yet. Overall, I am happy "enough" with the product (agree w/ you whole heartedly about expecting MORE for the $$ they charge) but my needs are simply a digital copy of the books / magazines / paper documents I want on my computer / archival setup for quick review. People desiring quality digital copies of pictures and high level reproductions should look elsewhere.
I wonder if the JPG format is due to the OCR models. It seems like that’s being used by default and cannot be turned off?
Great review
Just in time for me
Like you I have and old flatbed scanner, and its taking me ages to scan some books
So I thought I'd get one of these CZUR ET24s
But then I thought is it really just a digital camera - which we all have in some form.
Eg I have a midrange Nikon Z6
So I will be pleased to watch your video
FYI - If you’re interested you may purchase this on CZUR's store: bfrt.short.gy/czuret24pro-elaine-mac84
#bookscanner #ET24pro #CZUR
I bought mine *awhile* ago - maybe I should unbox it soon.
I think CuriousMarc already did a review on this scanner. He liked it, despite some small issues. Hopefully, those are all fixed by now.
If you read the instructions you’re supposed to only have the light from the scanner on in the room then you get better pictures
If you watched the video you’d know I tried this. This only slightly reduces glare. Even off camera, in tests with a pretty dark basement, it had trouble detecting pages and cropping things well.
@@Mac84 okay when you scan the book with Mattel rings you should use manual cropping …the Mattel rings confuse, the laser
@@skat4035I want to get this for scanning books would you recommend given what he’s saying about the compression ? Please respond I have so many books to scan and need my life to be easier 😭
Best review ever; finally someone that does not shill on this overpriced glorified camera
Thanks! I certainly call them like I see them.
I've owned one of these for some time now, and have learned how to manipulate the flaky software under most circumstances. The auto-cropping feature requires massive fiddling which pretty much negates the time saved by using a camera as the image capture, versus scanning it. Very frustrating. Also frustrating is the fact that a lot of the options and settings, such as the "Hint Tone" (check this box and it'll beep to tell you that it's okay to turn to the next page) and exposure setting, revert back to the defaults when you quit out of the application. It's also maddening how when you process a book for export, it always hides and moves the process to the background.
Probably the most irritating thing about it, is when scanning facing pages, it will do fine for 10 pages, then it'll start totally skewing images, like you experienced during your review. You then have to waste more time going back and editing to correct your book before exporting it. I've found if you manually create two page capture boxes and just line your book up so as to fit each page in its own box, it works flawlessly.
The finger cots help with positioning and mitigating the humps and the gutter in the middle, but the software doesn't edit them out perfectly, there are ghosts of them left behind in all images.
I find I mainly use the side lights, and mine started blinking after about 10 months. I emailed tech support, and while they did send me a replacement set of side lights, the process was not a fun one.
It's good at one thing: scanning black and white books and implementing OCR as searchable PDFs. This is pretty much what I bought the thing for, and when I bought it, it was on sale, so I feel pretty good about the purchase, despite it being a one-trick pony.
I don't save the scan as a searchable PDF because the software does a poor job keeping the file down a manageable size. I save any scans as a regular pdf and let another software program convert it to a searchable pdf file (which is noticeably smaller than what CZUR's program will do if you rely on them for a searchable pdf file).
@@Leo-lp4zh agreed...if you check the pop-up choice for 'keep original image', it'll output a rather massive file. I've found I can make the output file size a bit more manageable by selecting the 'medium' PDF Quality choice, (which is in the same dialog as the first pop-up I mentioned) but yeah, it's still bloaty. Which apps do you use to process your images into searchable PDFs, if you don't mind my asking?
@@jasonatkin6787 I have Devonthink for Mac (Pro edition) which comes with the Abbyy Finereader OCR engine. The funny thing is CZUR says they use Abbyy also but b/c of the big discrepancy betw/ both company's readable pdf files, I'm led to believe that Devonthink has a more robust version of the Abbyy engine. If you are on a Windows platform, I've heard good things about Scan Tailor Advanced but never tried it on my Windows machine.
weird - mine is working great. Just opened the box. Great quality and scans - not weird skewing like yours. You should call them.
The skewing isn’t the big problem, it’s the horrible sharpening filter it puts over every image no matter what the setting.
Jpg is a no go. What a weird thing to lock u into. It’s more work to do jpg than to not and save raw.
Amazing! Thank you!!
are there any other competing tophead scanner like this? Or is this the best tophead scanner currently? ( excluding flatbeads )
There are others in a professional class range that do far better, sadly they’re all well over $1,000.
Because of the post-processing done on the camera level with this device I cannot recommend it. You’re better off using a phone on a stand.
@@Mac84 got it, thank you so much for your indepth video review, really helped me deciding. I'll stick with my phone for the time being as you suggested. 👍
@@Mac84 Thanks for that reply! Could you name a scanner in next highest price category that has configurable firmware level postprocessing or compression that can be turned off and that you do recommend?
Great review. Was going to buy this but giving it a second thought now. Does the scanner come with the foot pedal?
I had this in my cart about to purchase before I found this review. Now I'm second guessing due to the JPEG compression ordeal. I do a lot of archiving and knowing that the raw source is actually lossy is a big let down. In the past I have done some DIY setups using a Nikon D7000 camera with a custom tripod and interval shooting. Now I question if that was still better quality than what I may get on this. Hmm. Thanks for the review!
I’m glad this helped you make your decision. I feel the same way about the raw source being unobtainable with this product, very disappointing. If you find another solution you like, let me know!
@@Mac84 I was just going to ask if you had any alternatives either 😆. It's tough for the price range to find anything other than this company's products...
Have they fixed the compression or image format in other words do they allow a TIF or other uncompressed formats
Nope.
As you and I discussed in-chat during one of Bruce Rayne's streams awhile back, and as you elucidate here, the software UX and UI are both pretty abysmal, especially for something marketed as ostensibly "professional". Admittedly, I purchased their lower-tier "Aura" model, but the software used by each appears to be identical and, indeed, I experienced all of the issues you did here reviewing your "higher-end" ET24. I too am a bit of a perfectionist with this sort of thing, and although much faster than a flatbed scanner, the results are exceedingly poor. And several of the reasons for this (mis-orientations, bad cropping, and AI-mishaps notwithstanding) are due to poor software design rather than the scanner itself. And of course, you have to babysit it way more than I would like, which sort of defeats the purpose.
Despite my excitement going in, thinking I would be able to rapidly scan many of the manuals I've collected, it has sat unused in my living room since I first tested it months ago.
Yes, there’s certainly room for improvement. The hardware is only as good as the software allows it to be. So I’m sure both can use tweaking.
I will try and use this for scanning large black and white manuals that are not archived. The results are better than not having it scanned at all. But for anything with color images, I think I’d stay clear.
@@Mac84 It's also poor with black and white photographs and illustrations. The camera system simply can't cope with fine detail. If you buy this product to preserve illustrated books and magazines for posterity, those later generations will be disappointed you didn't use a good flatbed scanner for the job.
is it usable with Image Capture?
I wonder if that stroke effect is it trying to improve readability for OCR
I think so from a few youtubers review this scanner said the same thing
Yeah, it's likely there to produce "bolder" results and improve the ability of the device's output to look better. It looks like a simple edge enhancement filter. It's a shame you can't turn it, or the AI stuff, off.
I have a cropping problem. Maybe software issue? When scanning a book I center it properly and it crops too much of the first page in the middle and appears on the second page, and on the second page the edge gets cropped too much. Has anyone experienced this? I have tried the adjustments and gets a little better but still not good.
It seems like you should consider redoing this test on a Windows PC. The results might differ.
There's a significant lack of a computer application capable of automatically processing smartphone-taken document photos.
On PC, there's an option like Scan Tailor, but it involves a lot of manual work. There's also a Java application called Booksorber, but it seems the author has ceased its support.
I've used this scanner with my PC laptop. The device only works with the provided software and the results were identical.
Much appreciated. JPG is a dealbreaker, no good for digital archiving. I think I'll stick to taking books/magazines apart and using my Fujitsu, regardless of how much work it is to unbind an average book.
Yeah, it’s such a shame. Glad this info was helpful to you!
If I am spending 500+ bucks on that thing I am expecting no mandatory JPEG compression and configurable postprocessing. This review is now 6 months old. Was that ever resolved with a software update, or it a hardware limitation, or does CZUR simply not care to make an update? Appreciate the review!
This was never resolved. CZUR only reached out asking me to edit my video to remove my critiques, which I refused to do.
I would guess if they really wanted to, they could turn off whatever sharpening/filtering function the camera is presenting via a firmware or software update. I certainly would be upset if this was the quality I got from a $600+ USD device.
@@Mac84 "Thanks for reaching out.
Due to CZUR scanners only support MJPG stream, so they only can be scanned to JPG format as default. Users need convert scanned JPG images to other formats by manual after scanning."
Support reply suggests it's a hardware limitation. They probably don't take individual pictures, but video to do their processing (page flip detection etc). And the (web)-cam that is built-in probably always does JPEG compression to squeeze the data through a USB 2.0(?) link.
It’s funny how they gave you a more direct answer… while I was contacting them for this video they wouldn’t even acknowledge the issue and suggested I reinstall the software.
@@Mac84 Half a year difference and I contacted tech support. Your contact was probably from marketing / creator outreach. At least we got a more useful answer now.
The real question is what do I use now? DIY rig something myself with a DSLR? Or can you recommend something?
I wonder if this would be good for scanning artwork as well…
I would say no. If you look at the examples at the end, anything with color it does weird filtering too. I would not recommend this for color magazines, let alone artwork.
I've been able to compare the results of a Czur ET24 Pro scanner with a flatbed scanner. The difference is night and day. My scans with a flatbed scanner (with a CCD sensor) are absolutely razor sharp, the Czur produces blurry lores photographs in comparison.
@@ymmv99 Thanks. This is the info I needed to save me from making a $600 mistake. I will now happily continue to weaken book spines, knowing that flatbed scanners have not yet been surpassed.
only jpeg? that is.. atrocious for a ~600$ scanner. I did have an obvious question.. on the top toolbar there is "Format" in the menu, was there anything there perhaps? I didn't see you messing with the menus/digging into the settings up there much.. The options in the menu screen you were in seemed to be the right one, but sometimes they config things strange. Overall if jpg is the default I would never spend that money on a cheap idea like that, exporting to tiff after loss is horrible lol
interesting
👍
Wow that was a bit of a tough review.
But its the only one that I have seen that points out those poor features
Eg the artifacts and the slightly inaccurate colours
I want to use it to scan old history books, mostly text into jpg and then OCR.
You did not seem to cover that.
Nor did you cover if its a Scanner or a Camera like in your title
Let's HOPE that was chocolate...
would you say it made a salad out of it lol
Scamera
Scanners are forms of cameras. It's more of a form factor question than a functional question of "is it a scanner or a camera?"
In this sense, this “scanner”is literally a webcam.