Is This The Best Scanner For Retro Material?
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- Опубліковано 3 чер 2024
- Preserving manuals, books, and magazines is a very important aspect of the hobby. Today I test the impressive CZUR ET24 PRO with retro material.
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Links:
CZUR ET24-Pro Scanner shop.czur.com/
Scanner on Amazon amzn.to/3G9rJcI
Radio Shack 1986 Canadian Catalog archive.org/details/radio-sha...
Amstrad CPC material: acpc.me/?language=eng#
Apple II material: ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
03:10 Flat-bed scanner
03:51 CZUR scanner
04:57 Flat cardstock
05:35 Brochure (shiny)
06:06 Spiral-bound book
06:56 Lay-flat book
07:38 Why do we care?
09:55 Hard to open book
11:05 Magazine
11:31 LARGE magazine
12:31 Importance of magazines
13:25 Radio Shack catalog
15:24 Game boxes
17:47 Boards
19:23 Conclusion
Music tracks:
Funky Stars by McKlain mcklain.bandcamp.com/track/fu...
Battro OST by McKlain mcklain.bandcamp.com/track/ba...
More awesome music by McKlain: www.mcklain.com
🛠 Tools I use ➤ noelsretrolab.com/tools.html
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#scanner #retro #magazines - Наука та технологія
Magazines and books WERE the internet for us growing up in the 1980s / early 1990s. They had news, reviews and encapsulated the culture of the early days of home computing. I worked on Amstrad and Amiga magazines (as a writer and later, an Editor), and it’s amazing to see them still being read and collected. I remember the excitement of visiting London, and discovering Foyles Bookstore where they had actual computer books (such as the Amiga reference library). So much information! I currently use an Amazon Scribe eInk tablet to read scanned books and magazines.
Almost didn't watch this video as I do not have anything to scan. But I'm glad I did as I found someone that enjoys the old computer books and magazines if for nothing more than to look at the old ads! I also remember going into a dedicated science and technology bookstore in Dallas, Texas in the early 90's. The had all the computer books I'd only seen pictures of in the magazines. I currently have an almost full 2TB SSD drive that has nothing but old computer and console books, magazines, brochures, advertising, manuals, etc. Always take it with me on a road trip as I never know what I will want to read.
Fantastic job reviewing the CZUR the amount of time and care you spent to do this is beautiful! And I hope you've given the CZUR team some more ideas about what they can improve for the next release!
I grew up in a rural farming town in Utah, US and none of the grocery stores had computer magazines. I was always into electronics and computers in the 80's and 90's but didn't get into the industry until much later. I feel like I missed out on a lot.
Computer Shopper was my favorite magazine back in the day because the ads made me aware of things I didn't know existed - it was also cheaper than other computer magazines. I'm a bit sad it's harder to scan because of the size.
Yes, CS definitely had a very unique niche. It was our view to the rest of the computer market world. I used to pour over the tiny ads on the back looking for the cheapest floppy disks! 🤣
@@NoelsRetroLab Yeah! Me too! It would take me 3-4 days to go through this "tome"! Inevitably I would see a "deal" on something, not take notes or mark it, and then when I was ready to order not be able to find the "deal" again! There were just so many ads!
@@NoelsRetroLab- It was a "bible" for computer fans, the thickness of Yellow Pages. heh I think that covering the harder to scan curved pages with a crystal clear plexi-glass would work fine.
I really like your channel! Games, retro, soldering...I started during COVID lockdowns and now I'm on the same level, haha. Muchas gracias!
You should try to put a sheet of paper behind the floppy disks. Maybe this helps the software to see better the object borders.
(I did it several times with CamScanner and other phone scan apps and it works, maybe it works for this scanner too)
Yes, good idea. The scanner will probably scan all the paper, but that's easy to crop.
Your approach is interesting, testing boxes, disks and motherboards. I mean RMC was also sent a C ZAR scanner for free and he didn't try these things.
Really enjoyed seeing the old Radio Shack catalogue scan. I used to shop a lot at Tandy in the UK which was basically a reduced range of exactly the same stuff, so lots of nostalgia there.
"A whole bookcase." - I outgrew one bookcase in the 1980's, long before digital storage became a thing. I ended up using film for things that were getting worn. Now I've been converting a lot to digital unless I use it a lot or unless something is rare.
If the book is too big just raise the scanner. Put a book under it😀. That what i did with mine. Works fine.
Interesting! I take it it managed to focus correctly even with the extra distance? I should try that.
@@NoelsRetroLab i didn't have a problem. As they say, your results may differ. But it's easy enough to try it.
Books come in different thicknesses, in the promotional material they scan 10cm thick bibles. For that to work there needs to be some kind of focus mechanism, be it soft or hardware based.
A little low on the resolution for me, but the scanner does have some nice processing capabilities.
In the mid 2000's I recycled a bunch of old Computer Shoppers from the mid to late 90's. They were from when everything had gone to PC clones and were somewhat boring. Luckily I kept all the ones from the 80's and early 90's I had. Maybe I'll figure out some way to scan them. Well, assuming I can *find* them again in this hoarder nest I call a house, LOL.
Thanks for the kind mention.
Happy Holidays everyone, and hopes for a peaceful new year.
I am far from being an expert, but in case of "soldering microscopes" it's kind of handy to use polarized lights and filters to avoid the glare in some specific cases. I am not sure if it can help in this case, though.
Yes, that makes sense. Someone who is a bit of an expert told me about that yesterday, so that sounds like something a higher-end scanner should come with.
Not only is a lot of software for retro computers old and possibly even rare but there is one other problem. Some floppies and other media may be starting to decay and rot. This makes preserving it a really wise idea. I really don't know what the best kind of storage media is for long term storage of documents and other valuable files but I think tape or a high quality enterprise hard drive may work well. The best thing you can do is keep copies on multiple media types. I have seen DVDs that have split in half leaving two thin plastic discs. Of course as you may imagine, I could not get the data back from them. I knew as soon as I saw that I may be asking for trouble if I put that in a drive so I didn't even attempt it. The reflective layers were messed up by the separation but I was also afraid that a disc in that state may damage my drive, especially if it bursts at high speed in the drive (it is rare but it can happen).
The only reason I don't decide on a tape drive is that so many of them are horribly expensive. You can buy a good used car for the price of some of those.
I remember searching an entire day in a book depot for a Z80 assembly book! What fond memories :)
16:28 Ah... the original Master of Orion. A man of culture and good taste. There's nothing like winning a Final War against half of the galaxy. The second game is a masterpiece, though.
OMG!!! I'd completely forgotten about that game! Loved it! Played it all the time. At some point my computers hard drive failed. Wouldn't even power up. Lost the game and all progress. Tinkered with MOO 2 but just too frustrated to have lost all my progress that I didnt have the enthusiasm to start over.
Great video! I like the direction the channel is taking: not only talking about fixing computers but also tackling more general aspect of retro-computing.
I have always preferred to read physical books, even for things like learning electronics or a new programming language. It's weird, but I feel like it's easier to concentrate wih paper books, you can write on them, leave notes, browse the pages quickly, mark the corners of pages, etc...
Regarding the PCB scan, what if you take several shots with your phone and you stitch them together on computer then? Do you think the time it takes is worth the quality compared to the scanner result?
Thank you! That kind of feedback is very useful. I know some people might only want to see repair videos, but I make videos about what I happen to be doing and thinking about at the time. I'll definitely continue with the usual repair videos, but I'm getting more comfortable branching out into other related topics.
And I'm 100% with you on physical books! Happy holidays!
@@NoelsRetroLab Most importantly, do what you like! The way you treat a subject is always entertaining😉
@@NoelsRetroLab this video wasn't electronics but was certainly worth the "lab" in your channel's title. very important video. even though I prefer physical myself, better have a pdf than nothing!
For the game inserts, a sheet of glass would be the best solution - one from the bed of an old dead flatbed scanner would be ideal
Very well done video. I really like the unique subject matter choice and the edge case tests. 👍
WOW! Amazing video!
Glad you liked it!
I've got the non-pro version of the scanner (so no angled lights for glossy pages). I found the software tends to have trouble with pages if the curve isn't convex -- such as at the start of a book / magazine when one side has a few pages lying flat, and the other side has a large number of pages. Advertisements with a dark background also seem to be troublesome for it.
The camera stand could be placed on top of a box to make the rostrum easel further away for the box edge to be focused. A great device that certainly speeds up the process of scanning hard copies. I have a photographic negative/slide scanner that uses a camera light defuser backlight that stores the images on an sd card. It did all of it without a PC further speeding up the session of scanning. The Nicon laser scanner was outside most home user budgets at £400.00 where as the digital camera scanner was around £80.00 from Maplins. Brilliant solution. Thanks.
Genial la información, Noel. Muchas gracias por el video, haces un gran trabajo.
About the electronic board, how about you diffuse the light with something like a paper? It'll make it less shiny.
I have one of those bookcases jammed full of programming and reference manuals too. Everything from the Amiga ROM kernel reference manuals to obsolete books on programming with MFC and bygone frameworks. When I look at it, I think about how long it's been since I bought one of those books... I suspect we're the last generation to have these sorts of collections.
The holy grail of retro computing magazines would be OCR of all the program listings; I tried many (online, native free apps, commercial ones) and not even one can deal with special characters (like PETSCII).
Many old magazines and books have poor quality printing, so even a standard zero would be a problem to recognize getting misinterpreted for an O, a Q, etc.
Oh really good point about listings!!!
It amuses me that many different youtubers I watch all end up with the exact same scanner (or some variant of it) and decide its their favorite.
Great video, as always! 👍
I'm too still have old books and few magazines, that are not available in the internet, but considering page count, I never had time to scan them.. 😂
I will stick with my phone and my over head Led light panel as this gives me good results for my plans, models and circuit boards.
And with all thing optical a little tweaking is par for the coarse. 👍 Happy Noel
I know the feeling when a video you worked on for a long time doesn't do much. The youtube algorithm is bad. NIce scanner - I use "ScannerPro" on my phone, it's not free unfortunately but allows me to quickly create PDFs with OCR as well.
The algorithm is full of surprises though. It'll come back to it 4 years later and pump millions of viewers into it. Nobody can explain why.
it's pretty cool even if physical materials aren't really my thing. The spiral bound issue might be fixable with future updates.
Like Playboy, I read Computer Shopper mostly for the articles.
Try elevating the objective lens by a few inches... might bring both pages of that Computer Shopper issue into the field of view.
Great video - I'm tempted to get one to scan my collection, though the price is a little off-putting. However, Linux support is a pleasant surprise.
P 166 to 173 is really interesting in that Radio shack catalog how it shows the coco2 and the model 4. I don't really see why the model 4 cost almost $4000 in 1985, seems like a fairly basic 8 bit computer. The image of the scan does look a bit lower quality than a flat bed scanner from what I can see.
I think I've got about 4 years worth of Amstrad Action, Computer Shopper and a few other titles in storage at my parents house. I used to scour about 4-6 magasines per month for any tidbits that I could gain.From what I recall, they are most likely in the '87 to '91 timeframe. They haven't even seen sunlight in all this time and given that I stacked them pretty high, I think most will likely be in pristine condition with no tears or folds. Are these worth scanning, or are they all online already?
does anyone have Amstrad Action in PDF format.. i can only find it as images...
cool vid..thanks Noel
I'm looking for a scanner to do research in a library. Most people take pictures with their phones or bring cameras but I don't want to do that because the angle is never right and sometimes it is out of focus. So I need something that is small and doesn't have to be connected to a computer when in use. I don't need high resolution as I'm going through old newspapers. Any tips?
This question is 6 months old but I´ll answer anyway. I use vFlatt app for my Android phone. I do not know if it is available for iPhone. It is very easy to use and it finds the edges of the page and takes then a photo and straightens the image.
I have the same czur scanner and can say that its difficult to get good results when scanning magazine size larger than DIN A4 (or Letter size). The internal lights including the additional light bar is way too dark to illuminate the page well. I have to use tweo external lights. Another point is the correctness of the color, no feature to adjust it.
How did you process the file after sanning?. The uploded files are not original from the czur app. The image-pdf is from macos-quartz app and the ocr-file is an internet-archive pdf. the last one has a low quality, resulting in only 25MB
Yes, definitely noticed the light part as soon as I moved something off center a bit. The scan came straight from the scanner. I just added all the jpg files into a single pdf and uploaded it. I didn't do OCR myself (that must have happened directly on archive.org).
This is such a good tool, I like it very much. But I feel, there was not too much AI used in it. Detecting the fingers depending on skin color? Problems removing the holders when the light is not perfectly what the designers expected? Problems with spirals? These are all the things neural networks can solve.
Interesting topic. Amstrad CPC machine language was only available in French? Good way to practice both of them ;)
It was the year I was studying in France, so that's what I had around me at the time 😃
@@NoelsRetroLab Oui je comprends :)
It comes with OCR, did you test how good this works?
I did not test that, but I should!
On which OS did you test the software? My main interest is, is the Linux version equal to the others? I assume there's an autosave for the scanned pages, too. It would not be nice if you kept pushing the pedal 500 times with your hands turning the pages instead of clicking on the mouse repeatedly, and then something "wonderful" happened. Oh, and if you do that, does it fill all of the memory and swap space and then crash?
EDIT: What file formats can the pages be saved as? I hope it's not only jpg...
I only tested on Mac and Windows and they were identical. I'm assuming Linux would be the same. Images are instantly saved to your HD after each scan, so no worries there. I just checked the image formats and it's only jpg, but you can choose low/med/high quality (and I was in medium like a moron).
@@NoelsRetroLab Thanks for the info. The jpg thing is a show stopper for me. I want the original data, and then compress it as I see necessary. 😕
Hello Noel's Retro Lab, any chance for us to work together to install and review our POE and WiFi security camera system? I had emailed you the details of the proposal. Hope can get your reply and move forward. Thanks 😊
Dont cheap out on resolution. Very often schematics are scanned so low they are worthless.
Fujitsu Scansnap SV600 is way better than this thing. The CZUR are really bad. But in general, overhead scanners are only good for casual scanning, they are not remotely suitable for archival.
Too much advertising on freebies on recent videos. it used to be a lot more fun. I hope you come back to the rapairs….
There is other brands that do better than this one ^^
I have Transport Tycoon Deluxe strategy guide bought from UK E-Bay for 180 USD. 1995. I have not seen any other guide for this game. This scanner would come handy, but not for one book...
1000 USD for scanner, a little bit too much
Diskette scan? Use a white sheet of paper!! Also, I had that 86 catalogue because I worked for Tandy back then. Be sure to get an ARCHIVE ORG account and leave a review, just like me.
Told everyone about you!!! Get the results you deserve - "Promo sm".