I bought it for scanning old document and books in the historical group archive, its a pretty solid device, it makes good quality scans! Thanks for the review!
at 9:12 in the video - instead of using platic thumb tips for holding paper, use an A4 size glass and put in on top of the book. that way you can flatten the book and scan it clearly. I employ this trick to scan my documents.
@@adamg4462 yes, it is, also (at least on phone) you receive double image. Exception - is using special museum glass that didn't glare. Also this is longer. For documents it is ok, but for book additional seconds is problem.
Excellent video! I just bought the ET18 on amazon for $420. A lot for a scanner, but I have a TON of documents to digitize. Very well built, the software is not the most intuitive to use and there is a bit of a learning curve - but overall it is doing a very good job so far.
Great comprehensive review; basically as stated below, the modern OHP. Could be a big market for this in the education field ... until the next big invention. I've had a lot of hassles recently with printer / scanners (in my home office) ; this could solve my problems ... maybe.
That Is A Very Good basic scanner. I just saw it on Amazon website. I was considering a professional scanner. I am relieved to see a lower priced scanner.
I think the newest scanner at $650 is an excellent price. This is a very advanced scanner for casual use. I recommend it wholeheartedly from what I saw it do. I think maybe professional operators would be able to feel comfortable with it if they have a limited budget.
Looking at the first book scan (09:28) you did, the left hand page is still terribly skewed, so the flattening software did a very poor job. I have to scan about 40 hand-written diaries of about A4 to A5 page size so I have no need for OCR. But I do need (A) very good flattening and (B) even illumination across the entire page. Is this the scanner for the job? I was thinking of buying a sheet of non-reflective Perspex to flatten the diaries for each scan but suspect this might still cause bright spots in the scan. Many thanks Pat.
Hi Richard, you are right the auto flattening seemed to be hit and miss, I think you are right about the Perspex glass. I think if you are getting hundreds of pages done this would be very usefull, if you only want to do a few i think a traditional scanner would be fine.
I tried with a sheet of glass, then perspex - no, and no. It is best to turn off overhead lights in the room, and use the supplied lights, or put your own cross lights on. A dim image does work well, actually. The auto unwarp, I find very good, within reason- don;t try & outsmart it. It expects a certain warp shape, and fixes that amazingly well especially with a deep spine. I did a more comprehensive report here under another questioner's question. I like it, but it has limits. As a lots-of-text scanner, it is best. As a photo scanner - I find flatbed better. Sadly the majority of people testing and reviewing this, have not used it enough to give a sensible opinion - I read many before buying it, and found all reviews to be overly amateurish, in my opinion!
@@ianstewart-koster9982 many thanks for your helpful replies. A couple of other questions if I may... I have dozens of old diaries to scan, some of which have spiral binding. Other reviews have said that the software fails to find the division line with spiral bound books (e.g. old computer manuals) so it won't split dual-page scans correctly. Is it possible to manually position the book so that the dividing line on the screen (in the software) matches the binding location? i.e. don't rely on the software automatically finding the join, just move it to where the division actually is? A follow on to this is - does it have enough depth of field, so that for a thick spiral bound book (1-2 inches), both the left and right pages are in focus? My other question is about reflection. I also have hundreds of old B&W photos which are glued (cannot easily be removed) in old photo albums. Some are matte but some are fairly glossy. If I turn off ambient lights and just rely on the side lights of the scanner, is it your experience that this will remove glare/hot spots from such scans of glossy material? These albums are almost 150 years old, fragile and don't bend, so a flatbed is not an option. I have already built a setup with a DSLR on a tripod and a couple of diffused photography side lights. This works well enough but: (a) it's bulky and inconvenient to move around, (b) I have to use a Perspex sheet to flatten the pages which is clumsy, (c) the resulting images still require a fair bit of post-processing in Photoshop with cropping and exposure/colour temp, and (c) it's wearing out the shutter on my camera. As the family historian in our family, my goal is to travel around the family on spare weekends and hoover up as much of their historic material (documents, diaries, photos) as possible in the short time windows they generally give me. To warrant the $800AUD expense, the CZUR would have to be a better proposition than my existing setup by being more efficient and decent quality - i.e. not museum archive but sufficient as a clear record for future generations. Bottom line - is this the device for the job? (or will I be cursing it for reasons which aren't evident from the reviews). Many thanks for your time...
@@richardfarland OK, Q1. When you select dual page mode, it expects the spine to be right in the middle. The little preview screen on your PC shows a projected spine line down the middle, and you just reposition the book so the spine is where expected, then it interprets each half as previous and following pages. No problems. Q 2. It projects 3 red LED lines on the page at the moment of the scan, and it picks them up, noting the variation or change in wapr between each, so I can unwarp the pages. The lines are not present in the image saved, but they are used for a rapid auto unwarp as it saves. Q3. if you choose single page mode, and put the book down crookedly it'll auto rotate to pick up and crop to the correct boundaries - as loing as there's not a bit of fluff on the backing mat, or it will pick that up too. Manual cropping is not bad - but takes a bit of getting used to. Q4. I've lost your sequence of questions, but hope the answers are useful. Depth of field is fine - totally. You can hang it over the edge of a table and pick up an image on the floor, more or less. And I needed to go wider, so I lifted it and put it on 2 old phone books to get more height. No problems. I've scanned books 3" thick. No problems. Q5. The scanner I have has a set of lights 2/3 of the way up the tower, which illuminated what you have, and avoids getting white spots like a ceiling light can give you. BUT, my opinion is it does a poor job of photos. BUT, my opinion is it does a poor job of photos. I repeated that because I am disappointed by that - compared with a standard flatbed scanner. Maybe I am fussy? I have an Epson Expression A3 scanner as well- flat bed- much slower, but very accurate. This Czur excels for text, text conversion, and in fact almost gives better pictures in poorer light. That surprised me. I have good LED sidelights of my own, but it was better when I did not use them. It seems to have what I'd call an auto-levels function, where even in low light, once it takes the picture, it looks for the lightest grey and drags that out to become white (zero % black), and it takes the darkest it can find, and drags that out to 100% black, and figures the middle out.
@Richard Marriner I ran out of room to reply above. I am in the same boat as you as far as being the family historian - but I have other interests beyond just family history. I'm in Qld, not far from Toowoomba. I picked it up 2nd hand on Ebay from soneone who was a student and bought it to save bulk on uni textbooks - but he did not like it. I do like it - within the parameters of what it is good for. For better photos alone, just use a good quality mobile phone - Samsung or Apple. As for thick spined books, I have a few packers and chocks that I put under each half as I go through, to try & keep the spread fairly horizontal - that is not always necessary, in theory, but it makes it easier. I mean if you have a 3" thick dictionary, and you are doing page 10, that means the left is on platen level, and the right side is 3" closer, with a woofty bend at the middle. It DOES work to straighten it, but putting a 2.5" packer under the rleft side so both pages are rather level is simply better. As you near the middle, you need no packers. As you near the end, put chocks under the other side. Hope that helps. As I said I've scanned some 16 thousand pages with it ok, and have passed the learning curve and its quirks, which most other reviewers or opinion writers have not.! Is it worth it? That's hard to say. I paid almost $700, 2nd hand, effectively brand new. It has been tremendously useful. My dad bought a different one - Epson I think - that cost him $1600, about 2 years ago. It looks like a train set lightpole with a hammerhead shark head on top, and it scans a beam across the page in an arc. His works well also, but I find mine better for speed for text conversion - his seems better for photos. I have seen similar-looking ones for under $200 and a few under $100 - I believe they're junk. The 2 things that disappointed me were photo quality of colour photos, and the advertised speed of scanning. You CAN set it to automatically scan the next page after it senses you have turned the page. But I found that auto sensing too slow. The foot pedal mouse clicker to scan the next image is the BEST aspect - leaves you hands-free to turn the pages and hold them flatter. The thumb page holders with barcodes do not always get cropped off. Try and scan and click too quickly and they come out skewed, like gobbling food down before being chewed - it gets stuck in the throat and takes longer to fix than if you did it steadily to begin with. It is tiresome when you have a few thousand pages to do - but you mustn't lose your focus on the task! Hope that helps
For home use that is the Absolutely best scanner I have ever seen. I want to know everything about it. I am considering the $250 model. I don't want to spend too much money on a scanner. I will put 10 hours a day on my scanning when I can. This is a manual scanner so I have a lot to learn and experiment with. I hesitated to buy a professional scanner just for my library of a few thousand books. It would not be worth the cost. I didn't want to pay a book scanning company $1 for 100 pages also. This is the Absolutely best basic scanner I have ever seen. I want to know what its life span is.
I’d like to have seen the results of an OCR on a Word doc and how it would cope with integrated images on a page. Also I was hoping to see how it coped with spreadsheet data into Excel. Otherwise a good review if a little too much time spent on things that you had already qualified.
I have a copy stand and highend cameras and lenses; I wonder if there is just software I can get that will process pictures from my cameras? Thanks for the great review!
Kann man mit Finereader auf den twain Treiber des scanners zugreifen? Mein bookscanner joyusing L140 wird mit twain angeboten. Aber Finereader findet den Twaintreiber nicht.
Hi Matt. Good video. Q. As well as books I need to digitise photos. Is the quality of actual scanned photos acceptable. Acceptable being generally good? Thank you. Jasmine
I bought the ET 18 pro, almost a year ago. All the online reviews are frankly pretty terrible demonstrations, and most reviewers do not answer useful questions - it's like they just got it and opened the box and have not figured it out, yet. I've scanned about 18 thousand pages so far - historical books from over 100 years ago. It is great, but it has its limits. Text is terrific. Photographs , pretty crummy for my liking. Passable, but not 'quality' like you'd get form a flat bed scanner. The software to convert to text-searchable PDFs is great - I use Abbyy, and that comes with it anyway. Conversions are not quick. I find it best to scan a book as high-contrast greyscale JPGs, then take the finished file, and run OCR PDF over it and save as a separate low res file. Leave it on its own for 10 minutes to do the conversions, and go and have a cup of tea. It does have the ability to change the colour of the original scans from grey to colour to black & white after you've taken them- without redoing the scan - as if it scans in colour, and then presents you with whatever version you request. Speed? The published speed settings I find impossible. Repeat, NOT possible. But I can scan an 800 page book in under an hour - close to 45-50 minutes- that's 400 images of 2 pages. But that is by using the foot pedal instead of the mouse- a brilliant item. It can sense auto page turning - but it is slow to sense when you have 2000 pages to do. IF you click too quickly, you'll get a crappy image - crooked, or blurry. Pace yourself to about 8 to maybe 10 images a minute, and it'll be OK. 8 is better (= 16 pages) The barcoded thumb thingies to hold pages open and auto crop are OK, but not great - I find myself having to recrop some pages if you go too quickly. The de-skew is great. The 'tell it to save 2 pages in one image as 2 separate pages' is good. The unwarp text is great - within reason. Time and practise shows what is best - do not try & outsmart it- let it do the figuring, and it'll be good. It expects a certain warp shape and undoes that very well. The auto contrast fixer is great. Like adjusting the curves or levels in Photoshop - auto per scan. For glossy pages, turn off overhead room lights, and use the side lights that come with it. The learning curve, regarding what NOT to do, takes some getting used to -only experience can help that. Editing after done is a bit clutzy... There are aspects I do not like, but overall I am glad I have it. It was about $800... You can raise it higher to scan a bigger footprint.
@@ianstewart-koster9982 Thank you Ian. I purchased the Epsom in the end. Very happy with both facets (documents and Image quality). Appreciate your response Jas
I have had this scanner for a few years and although it works as advertised the software is not very good and that's being kind. The company has done little to nothing to improve it. 😞😞😞
Problem with these scanners is that they don't work well on glossy papers... and most books in schools and colleges have that shiny paper... not old style paper... same thing with scanning IDs or Credit cards etc...
Kann man mit Finereader auf den twain Treiber des scanners zugreifen? Mein bookscanner joyusing L140 wird mit twain angeboten. Aber Finereader findet den Twaintreiber nicht.
You can purchase the CZUR Scanner here shop.czur.com/products/et16plus?variant=32699786559536
I bought it for scanning old document and books in the historical group archive, its a pretty solid device, it makes good quality scans!
Thanks for the review!
at 9:12 in the video - instead of using platic thumb tips for holding paper, use an A4 size glass and put in on top of the book. that way you can flatten the book and scan it clearly. I employ this trick to scan my documents.
wouldn't glare ruin the scan?
@@adamg4462 yes, it is, also (at least on phone) you receive double image. Exception - is using special museum glass that didn't glare.
Also this is longer. For documents it is ok, but for book additional seconds is problem.
he also use left plastic thumb in right hand and right one in left hand
Excellent video! I just bought the ET18 on amazon for $420. A lot for a scanner, but I have a TON of documents to digitize. Very well built, the software is not the most intuitive to use and there is a bit of a learning curve - but overall it is doing a very good job so far.
Great comprehensive review; basically as stated below, the modern OHP. Could be a big market for this in the education field ... until the next big invention. I've had a lot of hassles recently with printer / scanners (in my home office) ; this could solve my problems ... maybe.
That Is A Very Good basic scanner. I just saw it on Amazon website. I was considering a professional scanner.
I am relieved to see a lower priced scanner.
I think the newest scanner at $650 is an excellent price. This is a very advanced scanner for casual use.
I recommend it wholeheartedly from what I saw it do.
I think maybe professional operators would be able to feel comfortable with it if they have a limited budget.
Awesome video! “wham bam teslacam” haha!
Looking at the first book scan (09:28) you did, the left hand page is still terribly skewed, so the flattening software did a very poor job. I have to scan about 40 hand-written diaries of about A4 to A5 page size so I have no need for OCR. But I do need (A) very good flattening and (B) even illumination across the entire page. Is this the scanner for the job? I was thinking of buying a sheet of non-reflective Perspex to flatten the diaries for each scan but suspect this might still cause bright spots in the scan. Many thanks Pat.
Hi Richard, you are right the auto flattening seemed to be hit and miss, I think you are right about the Perspex glass.
I think if you are getting hundreds of pages done this would be very usefull, if you only want to do a few i think a traditional scanner would be fine.
I tried with a sheet of glass, then perspex - no, and no. It is best to turn off overhead lights in the room, and use the supplied lights, or put your own cross lights on.
A dim image does work well, actually.
The auto unwarp, I find very good, within reason- don;t try & outsmart it. It expects a certain warp shape, and fixes that amazingly well especially with a deep spine.
I did a more comprehensive report here under another questioner's question.
I like it, but it has limits. As a lots-of-text scanner, it is best. As a photo scanner - I find flatbed better.
Sadly the majority of people testing and reviewing this, have not used it enough to give a sensible opinion - I read many before buying it, and found all reviews to be overly amateurish, in my opinion!
@@ianstewart-koster9982 many thanks for your helpful replies. A couple of other questions if I may... I have dozens of old diaries to scan, some of which have spiral binding.
Other reviews have said that the software fails to find the division line with spiral bound books (e.g. old computer manuals) so it won't split dual-page scans correctly.
Is it possible to manually position the book so that the dividing line on the screen (in the software) matches the binding location? i.e. don't rely on the software automatically finding the join, just move it to where the division actually is? A follow on to this is - does it have enough depth of field, so that for a thick spiral bound book (1-2 inches), both the left and right pages are in focus?
My other question is about reflection. I also have hundreds of old B&W photos which are glued (cannot easily be removed) in old photo albums. Some are matte but some are fairly glossy. If I turn off ambient lights and just rely on the side lights of the scanner, is it your experience that this will remove glare/hot spots from such scans of glossy material? These albums are almost 150 years old, fragile and don't bend, so a flatbed is not an option.
I have already built a setup with a DSLR on a tripod and a couple of diffused photography side lights. This works well enough but: (a) it's bulky and inconvenient to move around, (b) I have to use a Perspex sheet to flatten the pages which is clumsy, (c) the resulting images still require a fair bit of post-processing in Photoshop with cropping and exposure/colour temp, and (c) it's wearing out the shutter on my camera.
As the family historian in our family, my goal is to travel around the family on spare weekends and hoover up as much of their historic material (documents, diaries, photos) as possible in the short time windows they generally give me. To warrant the $800AUD expense, the CZUR would have to be a better proposition than my existing setup by being more efficient and decent quality - i.e. not museum archive but sufficient as a clear record for future generations. Bottom line - is this the device for the job? (or will I be cursing it for reasons which aren't evident from the reviews).
Many thanks for your time...
@@richardfarland
OK, Q1. When you select dual page mode, it expects the spine to be right in the middle.
The little preview screen on your PC shows a projected spine line down the middle, and you just reposition the book so the spine is where expected, then it interprets each half as previous and following pages. No problems.
Q 2. It projects 3 red LED lines on the page at the moment of the scan, and it picks them up, noting the variation or change in wapr between each, so I can unwarp the pages. The lines are not present in the image saved, but they are used for a rapid auto unwarp as it saves.
Q3. if you choose single page mode, and put the book down crookedly it'll auto rotate to pick up and crop to the correct boundaries - as loing as there's not a bit of fluff on the backing mat, or it will pick that up too.
Manual cropping is not bad - but takes a bit of getting used to.
Q4. I've lost your sequence of questions, but hope the answers are useful. Depth of field is fine - totally. You can hang it over the edge of a table and pick up an image on the floor, more or less. And I needed to go wider, so I lifted it and put it on 2 old phone books to get more height. No problems.
I've scanned books 3" thick. No problems.
Q5. The scanner I have has a set of lights 2/3 of the way up the tower, which illuminated what you have, and avoids getting white spots like a ceiling light can give you.
BUT, my opinion is it does a poor job of photos.
BUT, my opinion is it does a poor job of photos. I repeated that because I am disappointed by that - compared with a standard flatbed scanner.
Maybe I am fussy? I have an Epson Expression A3 scanner as well- flat bed- much slower, but very accurate.
This Czur excels for text, text conversion, and in fact almost gives better pictures in poorer light. That surprised me. I have good LED sidelights of my own, but it was better when I did not use them.
It seems to have what I'd call an auto-levels function, where even in low light, once it takes the picture, it looks for the lightest grey and drags that out to become white (zero % black), and it takes the darkest it can find, and drags that out to 100% black, and figures the middle out.
@Richard Marriner I ran out of room to reply above.
I am in the same boat as you as far as being the family historian - but I have other interests beyond just family history.
I'm in Qld, not far from Toowoomba.
I picked it up 2nd hand on Ebay from soneone who was a student and bought it to save bulk on uni textbooks - but he did not like it.
I do like it - within the parameters of what it is good for.
For better photos alone, just use a good quality mobile phone - Samsung or Apple.
As for thick spined books, I have a few packers and chocks that I put under each half as I go through, to try & keep the spread fairly horizontal - that is not always necessary, in theory, but it makes it easier.
I mean if you have a 3" thick dictionary, and you are doing page 10, that means the left is on platen level, and the right side is 3" closer, with a woofty bend at the middle.
It DOES work to straighten it, but putting a 2.5" packer under the rleft side so both pages are rather level is simply better.
As you near the middle, you need no packers. As you near the end, put chocks under the other side.
Hope that helps.
As I said I've scanned some 16 thousand pages with it ok, and have passed the learning curve and its quirks, which most other reviewers or opinion writers have not.!
Is it worth it? That's hard to say. I paid almost $700, 2nd hand, effectively brand new. It has been tremendously useful.
My dad bought a different one - Epson I think - that cost him $1600, about 2 years ago. It looks like a train set lightpole with a hammerhead shark head on top, and it scans a beam across the page in an arc.
His works well also, but I find mine better for speed for text conversion - his seems better for photos.
I have seen similar-looking ones for under $200 and a few under $100 - I believe they're junk.
The 2 things that disappointed me were photo quality of colour photos, and the advertised speed of scanning.
You CAN set it to automatically scan the next page after it senses you have turned the page. But I found that auto sensing too slow.
The foot pedal mouse clicker to scan the next image is the BEST aspect - leaves you hands-free to turn the pages and hold them flatter.
The thumb page holders with barcodes do not always get cropped off.
Try and scan and click too quickly and they come out skewed, like gobbling food down before being chewed - it gets stuck in the throat and takes longer to fix than if you did it steadily to begin with.
It is tiresome when you have a few thousand pages to do - but you mustn't lose your focus on the task!
Hope that helps
For home use that is the Absolutely best scanner I have ever seen. I want to know everything about it.
I am considering the $250 model. I don't want to spend too much money on a scanner. I will put 10 hours a day on my scanning when I can. This is a manual scanner so I have a lot to learn and experiment with.
I hesitated to buy a professional scanner just for my library of a few thousand books. It would not be worth the cost.
I didn't want to pay a book scanning company $1 for 100 pages also.
This is the Absolutely best basic scanner I have ever seen. I want to know what its life span is.
I’d like to have seen the results of an OCR on a Word doc and how it would cope with integrated images on a page. Also I was hoping to see how it coped with spreadsheet data into Excel. Otherwise a good review if a little too much time spent on things that you had already qualified.
I have a copy stand and highend cameras and lenses; I wonder if there is just software I can get that will process pictures from my cameras? Thanks for the great review!
I’m not sure, it could work but the software needs an activation code
this is the modern overhead projector. pretty good price honestly 🤷♀️
Kann man mit Finereader auf den twain Treiber des scanners zugreifen? Mein bookscanner joyusing L140 wird mit twain angeboten. Aber Finereader findet den Twaintreiber nicht.
Great review! Can you guide as to the quality of scanned pages?
see my 2 more comprehensive replies to other questions below here. The quality depends on what your needs are.
Text - great. Photos - not so great.
Hi Matt. Good video. Q. As well as books I need to digitise photos. Is the quality of actual scanned photos acceptable. Acceptable being generally good? Thank you. Jasmine
I bought the ET 18 pro, almost a year ago. All the online reviews are frankly pretty terrible demonstrations, and most reviewers do not answer useful questions - it's like they just got it and opened the box and have not figured it out, yet.
I've scanned about 18 thousand pages so far - historical books from over 100 years ago.
It is great, but it has its limits.
Text is terrific. Photographs , pretty crummy for my liking. Passable, but not 'quality' like you'd get form a flat bed scanner.
The software to convert to text-searchable PDFs is great - I use Abbyy, and that comes with it anyway. Conversions are not quick.
I find it best to scan a book as high-contrast greyscale JPGs, then take the finished file, and run OCR PDF over it and save as a separate low res file. Leave it on its own for 10 minutes to do the conversions, and go and have a cup of tea.
It does have the ability to change the colour of the original scans from grey to colour to black & white after you've taken them- without redoing the scan - as if it scans in colour, and then presents you with whatever version you request.
Speed? The published speed settings I find impossible. Repeat, NOT possible.
But I can scan an 800 page book in under an hour - close to 45-50 minutes- that's 400 images of 2 pages.
But that is by using the foot pedal instead of the mouse- a brilliant item.
It can sense auto page turning - but it is slow to sense when you have 2000 pages to do.
IF you click too quickly, you'll get a crappy image - crooked, or blurry.
Pace yourself to about 8 to maybe 10 images a minute, and it'll be OK. 8 is better (= 16 pages)
The barcoded thumb thingies to hold pages open and auto crop are OK, but not great - I find myself having to recrop some pages if you go too quickly.
The de-skew is great. The 'tell it to save 2 pages in one image as 2 separate pages' is good.
The unwarp text is great - within reason. Time and practise shows what is best - do not try & outsmart it- let it do the figuring, and it'll be good. It expects a certain warp shape and undoes that very well.
The auto contrast fixer is great. Like adjusting the curves or levels in Photoshop - auto per scan.
For glossy pages, turn off overhead room lights, and use the side lights that come with it.
The learning curve, regarding what NOT to do, takes some getting used to -only experience can help that. Editing after done is a bit clutzy...
There are aspects I do not like, but overall I am glad I have it. It was about $800...
You can raise it higher to scan a bigger footprint.
@@ianstewart-koster9982 Thank you Ian. I purchased the Epsom in the end. Very happy with both facets (documents and Image quality).
Appreciate your response
Jas
Can these scan newspapers ? Full length newspaper page.
Yes
I have had this scanner for a few years and although it works as advertised the software is not very good and that's being kind. The company has done little to nothing to improve it. 😞😞😞
Problem with these scanners is that they don't work well on glossy papers... and most books in schools and colleges have that shiny paper... not old style paper... same thing with scanning IDs or Credit cards etc...
The ET18 has side lights that eliminate the glare.
Why is there no Android software so you can also work with smartphone + portable book scanner on the go? And then you need no laptop any more.
You can use a different scanning solution on Android like vFlat
Can you translate this video into Arabic please?
Kann man mit Finereader auf den twain Treiber des scanners zugreifen? Mein bookscanner joyusing L140 wird mit twain angeboten. Aber Finereader findet den Twaintreiber nicht.