CZUR ET24 Pro Professional Book Scanner, 24MP Document Camera, 3rd Gen Auto-Flatten & Deskew Tech, A3 Document Scanner, 180+ Languages OCR, Support HDMI, for Windows/MacOS/Linux

I had previously tried several other book scanners that look a lot like this one, but they had so many issues and problems that they were completely useless. This one, however, works right out of the box. But, if I actually knew of another similar scanner that worked to compare this against, I would probably only rate this 4 stars instead of 5 (keep reading to see why).First off, a big "Thank You" for supporting Linux. Even though these book scanners are nothing more than a camera and there's plenty of open source software on Linux to do all of the necessary functions for book scanning, it's still nice to be able to install the official software for a device and just use it.The line-lasers on this scanner help a lot with page flattening and is one major thing that similar scanners are missing. Sure page flattening can be done entirely in software, but having a line-laser really improves the algorithm and makes for better results.Unlike other similar scanners, this one seems to correctly report itself in the USB enumerations for all of the resolutions and settings. That is a must for compatibility across platforms. And, since it appears as a standard video and camera source device, it means you can easily use this with 3rd party software if desired.The finger cots are a little interesting. They do work to let you hold down the book and have special markings so that the software can remove them. However, the software doesn't fully remove the cots from the captured picture. It mostly uses them to figure out the boundary of the book so it can remove your hands/arms from the picture. There is still an outline of the cots on the page and it will generally cause some stray character interpretations and formatting weirdness in the OCR step -- and seemingly worse on the right-hand side of the page than the left-hand. For example, it will usually see the curvature of the cot as a ")" character and its presence will often cause a paragraph break or formatting change to the text it's recognizing that it wouldn't if the cot wasn't in the picture. I think they could have done a little more post-processing to remove them better, but they do generally work.The 24MP camera is more than sufficient for adequately scanning pages for OCR and to capture decent images from pictures in books. However, I wouldn't go with any lower resolution. OCR is very dependent on the pixel count to font size ratio (essentially the DPI captured). It has to be somewhat close to what the OCR engine was trained with or you will get garbage out. I learned that one years ago when trying to do an OCR of a book captured to fairly low-res JPG files. All I got out of OCR was random noise and so I figured it had no chance due to the JPGs being too low-res. Then a coworker clued me in on the pixel count to size ratio requirements and I used imagemagick to resample all of the files to a higher pixel count (still same basic "camera" resolution and same source images only more pixels) and tried the OCR again. This time it yielded a nearly 100% perfect OCR output and totally amazed me.I mention that about OCR and pixels because the resolution of the camera for a scanner like this is important. If your camera is too low-res, you may find you have to first resample all images before you can OCR it. I'm finding that the 24MP on this scanner is sufficiently adequate for the majority of fonts in books, but just barely. So, you definitely don't want to go lower than that.My first big complaint on this scanner is the user interface of the software. Yes, it works and works on Linux and is written in Qt making it a very compatible and cross-platform tool (albeit Qt 4, which is quite ancient since Qt 6 is the current standard), but it's very clunky, not overly intuitive, and somewhat annoying. It doesn't remember the last saved path correctly when relaunching. It has no easy way to automatically operate on multiple subfolders (such as if you want to scan different chapters to different folders), and there's a number of bugs and limitations in the software. However, it was usable to scan the books I needed to scan without resorting to pulling in 3rd party tools.One note on the software -- if you run an OCR session, the tool launches off a separate helper thread that then calls the OCR tool. That in itself would be fine, except that when its done with the extra thread, it doesn't close down that thread. When you are done and exit the application completely, that extra thread causes the app to not fully shutdown and to just hang. And it hangs with the scanner device locked in-use, meaning that if you relaunch the scanner software it can't find the scanner camera device anymore since it's "already in use". To get around this, you have to find the process ID for the stuck app and manually kill it after you close the app (or reboot). It only hangs, though, if you do an OCR session, and works fine if just using it to capture scanned pages.My second complaint is that the lights, even with the extra light-bar attached, aren't fully sufficient to evenly illuminate the page and causes some shadows. If you are scanning to OCR, it's fine, but if you were doing archival quality scans, it's not -- you will need to add some extra lighting. Perhaps this is where their extra light/shadow box is useful?The little LCD screen on top is basically useless, or at least it was for me. It's not moveable and is very small for trying to see a preview image. If you are sitting down at the table in front of the scanner as I was, since it isn't moveable, you can't see it at all. So I really have no idea what it was showing as I couldn't see it. For previews, I just used the live video feed on the computer in the scanner software to make sure things were lined up. They should have either saved themselves a few dollars per unit and just not put a display on it or spent a few dollars more per unit and put a larger, moveable screen on it that would actually be useful, but this one is useless.I mostly use the footswitch to trigger page captures. However, you need to keep an eye on either the red light at the top of the scanner or the images captured in the software to make sure it took a snapshot. A number of times, I would press the footswitch and then realized that nothing happened. I don't know if it's a problem with the footswitch just not sending a signal or if it's the debouncing logic on the switch or something else. But occasionally it wouldn't trigger. However, once you get in your rhythm of flipping pages, double checking the alignment periodically, and clicking the footswitch, you can scan a large book very quickly -- much faster than any flatbed scanner by a long shot. Though don't be concerned if the tiny preview images of each captured page occasionally look a little wonky -- that's just a Qt software quirk on how it renders such preview images (as I've seen it in other Qt-based apps). And it still looks good enough to be able to get a general sense of the page scan quality.I haven't tried the HDMI output connector nor have I used the microphone and "presentation" mode. At first, it seemed a bit of a gimmick, especially the microphone, but then I realized you could use it with things like OBS and either do a live stream presentation or capture a video presentation, and that could be useful.I primarily got the scanner because I have a number of books in foreign languages that I need to scan and OCR so that I can translate them to be able to read them. Several of the books are rare and need to be handled with care. I didn't want to scan them in a flatbed scanner, as doing so usually destroys the spine of the book. This device fits the bill and has worked quite well.For OCR, it comes with Abbyy, which is a commercial grade OCR tool. I had previously used the open-source Tesseract quite a bit and found it to be absolutely fantastic and ran circles around commercial OCR apps I had tried in the past. So, it was interesting to see how Abbyy compared. I must say, I'm pretty impressed. In fact, I would be hard pressed to tell the two apart. I personally think that Abbyy just took the open-source Tesseract OCR engine and trained it with their own datasets to make it into a separate commercial app. They seem to be too similar to think otherwise. But that also means you will have no issues with OCR. The Abbyy OCR this comes with works fantastically. However, if you ever prefer to use something different, you can always take the JPG files from this scanner and run them through Tesseract or other OCR tool.You can also inject your own scripts into the OCR batch process. That means if you want to run things through ScanTailor or something first, you certainly can.That's pretty much it -- this is not a perfect scanner, but it comes with everything you need to get going, was very nicely packaged, and worked right out of the box and on my Linux computers. I had previously tried to save a few bucks and tried several competitor scanners, but couldn't ever get them to work correctly. If there was anything else to actually compare this with, I would give it 4 stars instead of 5 because of the minor quirks and bugs -- their software isn't fully polished. But for general scanning needs, you won't go wrong with this scanner.

I've been using the CZ24 scanner for a few months now and have been pleased with the output. I couldn't decide between this and the ScanSnap SV600 - and ended up buying both. There are strengths and weaknesses to both, but I find myself using the CZ24 far more often of the two. For most book scanning jobs, this does everything I need. The quality of high color saturation scans is better with the SV600, but that is only a fraction of my typical use. For the color you generally encounter in most books, publications, journals, etc., the CZ24 is more than adequate.If I had to do it over, I would have bought the CZ24 alone. The CZ24 is the more versatile of the two and the CZUR software is easier to use. Easier - but not highly intuitive. Spend some time and play with the software to understand how it works before dedicating yourself to scanning a 200 page book. Once understood, it goes pretty well.

I own a CZUR Fancy S Pro, AURA X Pro and this ET24 Pro. I waited a while to write this review because I originally had issues with the quality of the scans that tech support could not help with, but after some experimentation I found a solution and am getting GREAT quality and so the reason for the 5 stars. I am passing those tips along in this review so other can make the right choice.The difference between the AURA X Pro and the ET24 is in the fidelity and quality fo the scan. While the Aura X is GREAT, the results from the ET24 are OUTSTANDING! But this comes with some considerations anyone who purchases must be willing to accept. These result mostly from the sensativity of the scanner and accuracy of the scan.When I originally started using the ET24 I could not get scans without a "ghost" from the specialized finger cots used to hold the page down. You could barely see these on the scanned page, but they were there. The tech support team was very helpful but it came down to very small shadows from the room lighting. No matter how I changed the room lighting (or turned it off) this did not help and the lights on the scanner did not resolve it. The pages were still great, but not "perfect". After a lot of trial and error I went to the local art store and bought a piece of 16" x 20" MUSEUM QUALITY non-glare glass (not the cheap stuff). As the picture I uploaded shows the added advantage from using the glass is that is kept the pages flat without the need for the finger cots and solved the glare problem. Flipping pages and scanning took longer, but the results were well worth it for books and documents I wanted in the best posisble quality. I am not considering spending the money to buy a 16' x 20" sheet of Tru Vue Optium Museum Acrylic instead of worring about the glass that could break (see using the ET24 as a portable scanner below). I found that using the glass I could also scan without using the main lights on the head of the scanner and obtained great results since the glass diffused any ambient light.The second challenge I found with the scanner is that is is not as portable as my Aura X Pro. If you want super portability then go with the Aura X.... BUT, I also found a way to take the ET24 with me when I do rare books and documents in libraries that I want the greatest quality for. This was also a simple solution. I purchased an inexpensive "Tower" computer case from amazon. The original ET24 box with padding slips into easily as does the 16" x 24" glass (another reason I plan to buy acrylic). All the accessories (and more like the CZUR binder covers) fit right in so I carry this with my laptop to those special places and it works like a champ. SO YOU CAN, with little effort, use the ET24 as a portable scanner! For those who want to use the full black mat on the ET24 you can buy a larger glass piece but I did not see any need for it.I uploaded some photos to show all of this.Any regrets? YES ONE! That is that within about a week after I bought my ET24 the ET25 came out and I wish someone told me! Other than that, great products and hope all this helps you in buying and using yours!