CZUR ET MAX Professional Book Scanner, 38MP Document Camera, Laser Curve-Flatten, USB High Speed Document Scanner, 180+ Languages OCR, Capture A3, Support HDMI, for Windows/MacOS/Linux

Great scanner

The CZUR ET MAX has been a game-changer for my workflow. The 38MP camera captures incredibly sharp images, and the flattening technology works beautifully even with thick books. Scanning is fast, accurate, and consistent, saving me hours compared to traditional flatbed scanners. The software is intuitive, the OCR is surprisingly precise, and the device handles everything from books to loose documents effortlessly. Build quality feels premium, and setup was simple. One small area for improvement: out of five notebooks I scanned, a couple of pages came out slightly tilted. It’s not a major issue, and I’m confident this can be addressed in future software updates. Everything else works flawlessly. Overall, the ET MAX is a professional-grade tool with outstanding value. If you work with books, archives, or documents regularly, this scanner is absolutely worth it. Highly recommended.

If you have frequent scanning needs, it is recommended to get this device because you only pay once, though it’s not cheap. By contrast, I have found many book-scanning solutions that require a fee for every scan, which makes the CZUR ET Max a more affordable option in the long run. The real magic kicks in after you snap a photo! The three laser lines and registration marks on the finger cots work together to align, straighten, and unwarp the final scan. These two hardware perks make the software way smarter at processing images—meaning fewer duds, fewer rescans, and way better OCR results. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) has been around for decades. I’ve never used CZUR’s OCR engine before, but I’ve got tons of experience with Adobe Acrobat Pro’s OCR and have messed around with various open-source tools over the years. My expectations for OCR are pretty high these days, mostly because online OCR services have gotten so much better than they used to be. CZUR went with ABBYY’s OCR solution—they’ve been in the game since the 1980s. The ABBYY engine is multilingual, which let me accurately OCR texts packed with old Norse vocabulary and their phonetic characters. I picked English and every Germanic language I could think of, and the final output caught every UTF-8 character from the original text perfectly. That said, the feature isn’t perfect: I have a small Thai tarot book that the software can’t OCR. Overall, this OCR engine is more accurate than Adobe’s. I end up correcting way fewer words in the final result. The software also tries to preserve the original formatting when exporting to Word (it supports both DOCX and the old DOC format). That worked really well for me—indentations, font size differences, and inline formatting all stayed intact nicely.

My kids kept travel journals on every trip or vacation we took, pasting plane, museum and show tickets in pages, adding foreign coins and lots of postcards, often with copied art on the facing page. They are terrific but nearly impossible to scan with a flatbed scanner, and moreover there are 44 of them, 1935 pages total. With this scanner, I was able to scan the entire set in a single long day. The scans look great. It is a remarkably good piece of equipment. The black mat rolled flat, with a slight curve just at the edge, so I did not experience the problem others report. I was concerned by reports that the software sends a lot of data to China, so I ran the software inside a virtual Ubuntu machine that was both blocked from the rest of the network, and even from the PC running the VM. It wasn't sending data outside except when it first started up, and when one requests the manual. Overall I felt excessively paranoid but better safe. The software fits a rectangle to the book on the mat. It does this essentially perfectly. What makes the job go very quickly is that you can have it scan when motion stops, so that every time a page is turned, it snaps the next page, giving a ding that it is time to turn the page. You don't need to straighten the book -- it figures out when it is on an angle and adjusts. I quit looking after a while, doing an entire scan by ear. The scans are very high quality. In contrast to getting the angle exactly right, it doesn't flatten all that well. But that is a lot to ask, I think, of the software. Because the books I was scanning have a lot of stuff glued to the pages, they could have a serious bulge, and the software attenuates but does not eliminate the bulge. I was hesitant to spend $800 on a scanner, but I'm glad I did. The experience was much better than I hoped. I probably could have done the same job with less resolution, like the 24MP, but I'll get enough use out of it to warrant the better one. I have tried in the past using a rig with a cell phone suspended above a desk and a circular light, but somehow it always wound up with glare. This worked. For glossy postcards pasted in the pages, I turned off the light next to the camera and turned on the "mid level" light that came with the unit, and had no glare. Another nice thing about this experience is that it comes with a foot pedal, which I used if I needed to hold a page down. (The yellow page holders showed up in the images -- may they aren't hidden in the linux software? But I just cropped them out.) The box is incredibly well packed and you could probably drop it ten stories without damaging it. I put it all back for storage. The mid-level light gives one a lot of control to eliminate glare. This device is definitely expensive, but it is very well-made and a great tool.

I had my doubts when I initially purchased the Czur scanner. Previously, I relied on a flatbed scanner to digitize yearbooks and scrapbooks, aiming to save these mementos for my children and grandchildren. Since they’ve never displayed much curiosity about these old keepsakes, I worried they might end up discarded one day. The flatbed method was extremely time-consuming, however, so I hunted for a more efficient alternative and stumbled upon the Czur device. I decided it was a reasonable gamble. Setting it up was straightforward. While the accompanying manual is limited in detail, numerous online guides allowed me to start using it in no time. After roughly 30 minutes of testing, I was astonished: digitizing a full yearbook—something that used to take hours with a flatbed—now took under five minutes. It first captures pages as JPGs, then converts them into multiple formats (PDF, TIFF, Word, searchable PDF, and others) according to your preferences. I tested both the foot pedal and automatic page-turn detection, and both functioned smoothly. For older, warped books, I needed to use the finger cots (I had to watch online tutorials to master their use, but it was simple once I got the hang of it). Each page takes just a second or two to scan, and the quality is excellent. My yearbooks and scrapbooks are filled with photos and handwritten notes, and the Czur reproduced them accurately. To be honest, it doesn’t quite match the photo quality of a specialized scanner like the Epson FF-680, but a major advantage is that I don’t have to take photos out of scrapbooks. For laminated pages or plastic covers that created glare with the overhead light, I simply turned off the default arm lamp and switched on the side lamps (easily done by pressing a button on the back)—this completely got rid of the glare. The scans are more than adequate for archiving purposes; only if you planned to enlarge them into posters would you notice any difference. All in all, the Czur scanner saves an incredible amount of time compared to flatbed scanners. I strongly suggest it to anyone looking to preserve old documents, yearbooks, or scrapbooks.

I really like this device's design and I wanted to give it at least 4 stars but there are too many reasons for a lower rating. Tech support is fast to reply, but not really helpful, worthless actually. This device is only worth $800 because of its software. However, the software was very unreliable on Windows; it doesn't work on Linux Mint, or any version of Linux other than Ubuntu. Tech support didn't seem interesting in troubleshooting Windows (45 minutes of scanning saved to a non-existent location), so we have no choice but to return it. It's not entirely CZUR's fault, Windows is not a very reliable OS. But the goal is to spend time scanning, not troubleshooting Windows. Without working software, it's better for us to buy an $800 camera, slap it on a tripod with a cheap ring light, and wait a year for AI to be able to do the same thing that the CZUR software is supposed to do.