CHF430.99
Czur Portable book scanner
Product ratings
Pros
Cons
6 reviews
Annoying little problems
Despite what is stated in the description, the scanner cannot be used completely standalone, in a library for example.
It's also not easy to understand how best to use it, for example to ensure that a series of PDFs are correctly compressed and don't 'weigh' too much.
Photo scans are of very average quality.
In short, before you buy, take a good look at what the competition is offering for the same price.Pro
- Fairly easy to use
- Nice design
- Good quality French OCR recognition
Contra
- Resolution not great
- Did not contain the advertised battery
- Software manual in English and Chinese only
Scanner ... in progerssion
I don't find it very "friendly" to use. Could be improved...
Pro
- Not too expensive
- Compact
Contra
- Not very practical
- Not very "friendly" software
Simple and fast compared to flatbed scanners. Works well under Winows
Well processed, no Linux driver, my email is spammed
I have the Shine Ultra Pro, but the whole series is similar.
Under Windows (virtual machine) the scanner works fine. On Linux, the driver/program is missing (I had to write a script to be able to scan).
On the given email to CZUR I now get Chinese spam (data leak?). Luckily I use one email address per supplier.Pro
- Processing
Contra
- Linux
- Spam
Great for digitising books
I unpacked the product, assembled it, connected it & installed the software with the DVD. Instructions there too. The equipment is of high quality. Also the software interface.
I tried the device for the first time today, digitised almost 800 pages of a book (about 2 hours).
Since I didn't know how reliable the software was, I exported the scans as OCR PDFs after every 150 pages I digitised and then the next 150 pages. There were no crashes. I am satisfied with the quality. Areas outside the pages are automatically cut off as well as possible.
The centre of the book is equalised by the software. Formats up to A3 seem to be possible without problems.
The keyword search in the generated OCR PDF with the common PDF viewers works very well. The pages are smoothed.
There are 'finger cots' for the fingers, but I wore white cotton gloves, which didn't interfere with the scans. Because with gloves on, you're still a bit faster turning the pages. A foot pedal can be used to trigger the scan. Press with the foot, turn the page, press again with the foot, turn the page and so on. This is very quick.
For books with rough paper, the main light is no problem (the room should otherwise be completely dark), but if you want to scan glossy pages, you have to switch on the side lights. I haven't been able to do that, or rather nothing happens on my machine when I press the button at the back. Either it's broken or I haven't figured out how to do it yet. Since most books are written on rough paper, no problem. And if I do want to scan glossy pages one day, I can switch off the main light and put two desk lamps on the left and right of the table to get the same effect as the side lamps that might not work. I am satisfied. Saved me a lot of work with the flat board scanner, plus OCR. The book was also not affected in this way.Excellent for books
A beautifully designed product. Works very well for books. Easier and much faster than using a flatbed scanner. Does not work so well if the document has shiny paper, due to position of the lamp and reflections. Text recognition is very good, thanks to the ABBYY Engine (the ABBYY FineReader PDF app is excellent too - but it does not support the Czur). The "Searchable PDF" output is perfect and the PDF files are small. Outputting to Word format has inconvenient columns and other formatting which is difficult to remove. The software is not as good as the hardware, it is an old-fashioned design which does not look like a Windows application. Ordering scanned pages is not so easy, without switching to 'File Explorer' and renaming the files. This is a Chinese device, so I do not really trust the huge package of Chinese software - who knows if it has hidden malevolent or snooping features (which may be activated at a later date).
Pro
- Excellent character recognition (OCR)
- Uses ABBYY FineReader Engine for OCR (not Chinese)
- Much faster than using a flatbed scanner
Contra
- Chinese
- Software could be better
- Not so good with shiny paper
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