Full Review: CZUR ET24 Pro - Is it a scanner or a camera? 

Great review Steve. I believe they were thinking "Let compress it to JPEG for preview and everything else, now lets save as an uncompressed TIFF.. hold on a minute..."

FYI - If you’re interested you may purchase this on CZUR's store: bfrt.short.gy/czuret24pro-elaine-mac84 #bookscanner #ET24pro #CZUR

Great review Steve Yes TIF That would help with the Parallax that is induced with. the Laser scanning

Amazing! Thank you!!

I gave up on the auto-cropping feature after about a week of use and went with the fill screen. Its more important to get the ambient lighting just right.

Purchased this to “scan” vinyl record covers and CDs. Because record covers are larger finding a flatbed just isn’t going to happen. I’m very unhappy with the results. Images are distorted, pixelated and blurry. For a $600 price tag and a “24MP camera” this one falls short. While the auto scan feature is nice. I can achieve similar results & better quality with a light box, Bluetooth shutter and an iPhone 13 Pro Max. I will be returning this asap.

I've been an owner of this product close to 1 year. In my view, the software is the weakest link to an otherwise fine product. Many early adapters of this product on Facebook sent ALOT of constructive comments for improving the software to the company but after 1 year nothing has been implemented despite company comments they would improve the software. Until they improve this aspect of the product, I CAN'T "enthusiastically recommend" the ET 24 Pro to everyone yet. Overall, I am happy "enough" with the product (agree w/ you whole heartedly about expecting MORE for the $$ they charge) but my needs are simply a digital copy of the books / magazines / paper documents I want on my computer / archival setup for quick review. People desiring quality digital copies of pictures and high level reproductions should look elsewhere.

Great review. Was going to buy this but giving it a second thought now. Does the scanner come with the foot pedal?

Great review Just in time for me Like you I have and old flatbed scanner, and its taking me ages to scan some books So I thought I'd get one of these CZUR ET24s But then I thought is it really just a digital camera - which we all have in some form. Eg I have a midrange Nikon Z6 So I will be pleased to watch your video

Thank you for posting this review! I'm investigating book scanners at the moment and this one was on my radar...WAS! That's some pretty awful image quality for $500+ especially since my $50 flat bed's quality blows it outta the water. Fancy not being able to change those settings too. Going to start looking at the Fujitsu ones instead hopefully they have better camera sensors and software! The quality reminds me an awful lot of the commercial 8mm scanners (wolverine/reelz etc etc) which all seem to use the same low quality camera sensor and locked down software - sure they'll do they job...but the quality is pretty dire.

I wonder if the JPG format is due to the OCR models. It seems like that’s being used by default and cannot be turned off?

Thank you for a proper review of this camera setup. You correctly declared the supply of the machine and gave it a good balanced test. I was curious how badly it would do with book spines etc. I can see it being useful for, (a very few,) people who scan in books containing nothing but plain text for Gutenberg type work otherwise it is just plain bad. It would be bad for £50 let alone £500. I have just bought a cheap Canon that is much better even if it does look like it'll break if I breath to hard near it and my old Epson 1670 was also much better.

is it usable with Image Capture?

I have a cropping problem. Maybe software issue? When scanning a book I center it properly and it crops too much of the first page in the middle and appears on the second page, and on the second page the edge gets cropped too much. Has anyone experienced this? I have tried the adjustments and gets a little better but still not good.

I think CuriousMarc already did a review on this scanner. He liked it, despite some small issues. Hopefully, those are all fixed by now.

👍

Okay so out of all the book scanners, which one is the best?

Have they fixed the compression or image format in other words do they allow a TIF or other uncompressed formats

If you read the instructions you’re supposed to only have the light from the scanner on in the room then you get better pictures

interesting

I wonder if that stroke effect is it trying to improve readability for OCR

weird - mine is working great. Just opened the box. Great quality and scans - not weird skewing like yours. You should call them.

I had this in my cart about to purchase before I found this review. Now I'm second guessing due to the JPEG compression ordeal. I do a lot of archiving and knowing that the raw source is actually lossy is a big let down. In the past I have done some DIY setups using a Nikon D7000 camera with a custom tripod and interval shooting. Now I question if that was still better quality than what I may get on this. Hmm. Thanks for the review!

I've owned one of these for some time now, and have learned how to manipulate the flaky software under most circumstances. The auto-cropping feature requires massive fiddling which pretty much negates the time saved by using a camera as the image capture, versus scanning it. Very frustrating. Also frustrating is the fact that a lot of the options and settings, such as the "Hint Tone" (check this box and it'll beep to tell you that it's okay to turn to the next page) and exposure setting, revert back to the defaults when you quit out of the application. It's also maddening how when you process a book for export, it always hides and moves the process to the background. Probably the most irritating thing about it, is when scanning facing pages, it will do fine for 10 pages, then it'll start totally skewing images, like you experienced during your review. You then have to waste more time going back and editing to correct your book before exporting it. I've found if you manually create two page capture boxes and just line your book up so as to fit each page in its own box, it works flawlessly. The finger cots help with positioning and mitigating the humps and the gutter in the middle, but the software doesn't edit them out perfectly, there are ghosts of them left behind in all images. I find I mainly use the side lights, and mine started blinking after about 10 months. I emailed tech support, and while they did send me a replacement set of side lights, the process was not a fun one. It's good at one thing: scanning black and white books and implementing OCR as searchable PDFs. This is pretty much what I bought the thing for, and when I bought it, it was on sale, so I feel pretty good about the purchase, despite it being a one-trick pony.

Jpg is a no go. What a weird thing to lock u into. It’s more work to do jpg than to not and save raw.

are there any other competing tophead scanner like this? Or is this the best tophead scanner currently? ( excluding flatbeads )

As you and I discussed in-chat during one of Bruce Rayne's streams awhile back, and as you elucidate here, the software UX and UI are both pretty abysmal, especially for something marketed as ostensibly "professional". Admittedly, I purchased their lower-tier "Aura" model, but the software used by each appears to be identical and, indeed, I experienced all of the issues you did here reviewing your "higher-end" ET24. I too am a bit of a perfectionist with this sort of thing, and although much faster than a flatbed scanner, the results are exceedingly poor. And several of the reasons for this (mis-orientations, bad cropping, and AI-mishaps notwithstanding) are due to poor software design rather than the scanner itself. And of course, you have to babysit it way more than I would like, which sort of defeats the purpose. Despite my excitement going in, thinking I would be able to rapidly scan many of the manuals I've collected, it has sat unused in my living room since I first tested it months ago.

If I am spending 500+ bucks on that thing I am expecting no mandatory JPEG compression and configurable postprocessing. This review is now 6 months old. Was that ever resolved with a software update, or it a hardware limitation, or does CZUR simply not care to make an update? Appreciate the review!

It seems like you should consider redoing this test on a Windows PC. The results might differ. There's a significant lack of a computer application capable of automatically processing smartphone-taken document photos. On PC, there's an option like Scan Tailor, but it involves a lot of manual work. There's also a Java application called Booksorber, but it seems the author has ceased its support.

I wonder if this would be good for scanning artwork as well…

Let's HOPE that was chocolate...

Wow that was a bit of a tough review. But its the only one that I have seen that points out those poor features Eg the artifacts and the slightly inaccurate colours I want to use it to scan old history books, mostly text into jpg and then OCR. You did not seem to cover that. Nor did you cover if its a Scanner or a Camera like in your title

would you say it made a salad out of it lol

Scanners are forms of cameras. It's more of a form factor question than a functional question of "is it a scanner or a camera?"

Scamera