CZUR Book & Document Scanner with Smart OCR for Mac and Windows

This is impressive. I first wanted something like this when Google worked on their Library of Congress project around 2007 or so. I have tens of thousands of documents that I've been wanting to digitize so that I can get rid of the physical stacks. Various books too. This product absolutely does what it's supposed to do.Out of the box, this is an impressive display. I would say their packaging rivals that of Apple products (of which I also use). It's slick, solid, well-presented, and gives a good feeling of quality. I would say that hardware wise, that quality delivers. The unit is solid, easy to use, quick to assemble, and easy to store. The only thing I found a little iffy is the extra light. It's absolutely useful and while I think they did a great job with the design, the light is held in place with a magnetic rectangle lock (very similar to the power cord on a MacBook). Because the light is being pulled by gravity and is a little heavier, it can come off with just a little force. Again, not a huge deal, but it's my only complaint with the hardware. There is a foot pedal and hand pedal that allow you to scan without touching the scan area. That in itself is really convenient and functional.The software is good, but definitely leaves some features to be desired. I noticed that the Fujitsu version of this allows multiple items to be laid on the black cloth and processed individually. This device doesn't seem to allow for that. The multi-page gets off from time to time and I'll have to toy with it in those cases. As a designer and engineer, there are a number of software features that I could envision being pretty easy to build into the software. I also don't feel that the algorithm that "blends in" the thumb holders is very strong. It works, but they could definitely improve upon this significantly.I was also a little frustrated having to upgrade my version of OS X to use their scanner software. I was only half a version behind and I just can't understand what functionality of the newest OS X release they use that would warrant that. So it took me some time out of the box before I could use it since I had to upgrade my entire machine, but it's been running smoothly since.If you have a lot of documents or books that you want to scan, I would highly advise this. If you have a ton of photos, unless I'm mistaken and there IS a way to do multiple scans at once, you might consider their competitor. It's more expensive, but that one feature would save me a TON of time with my scanning process. I've had it for 2 days and have already scanned over 3,000 documents - so yea, it's pretty fast.

I've only had this for a day, so I may have to update this review as I use it more. Assuming something doesn't break right away, I've played with it enough to declare it VERY USEFUL, a huge leap forward in technology. Perhaps even a 'revolution' in my way of life ;)I read books from the 1800's that are long out of print, not available anywhere except maybe ONE lending library if I'm lucky. I also like to scan individual pages out of a thick music score when I'm traveling. Has worked well in both those cases on my test runs. In fact, scanning with this device has made easy what was before sometimes impossible. Seems like a great way to scan handwritten notes too, though I've not used it for that yet.What I ESPECIALLY like:- I can scan books, sheet music, etc that are lying flat on my desk. The 'autoscan' feature activates after pages have been flipped, so you can multitask and just flip pages when you're ready. It waits for you while you vacuum or whatever. I put a weight inside the 'thumb glove' to keep pages open while I'm away after flipping. Scan quality was excellent on all things I tried so far.- When not in use, I now use the scanner as THE lamp for my desk area-- it illuminates my entire work space quite evenly. They even provided 2 additional USB-rechargeable portable LED desk lamps -- a MOST pleasant surprise -- better than any I've bought on the market.- The OCR and PDF work sufficiently well for me. The page curvature elimination works very well also. The 'thumbprints' from holding the pages down sometimes don't get edited out completely; but this doesn't bother me too much. I might eventually find out what's wrong on those pages where it hasn't worked.So I gave it 5 stars despite some 'rough edges' which are as follows:- documentation is very minimal and incomplete, so you've got to figure a lot of stuff out on your own by just trying things.- installing on windows requires running the app with admin privileges, a pain. They explicitly say in the provided documentation (such as it is) that it runs only under windows not MAC, but I haven't tried obtaining MAC Software which is rumored to be available online. I have computers that run everything, so I'm OK with using it on windows for now. Linux would be my #1 choice.- GUI is very barebones and primitive, but gets the job done. I personally don't require a lot of polish in a GUI as long as I can do what I want.- When OCR-ing a book, you get blocks of text interspersed with headers, which I suppose is to be expected. I'm after text and almost never care about photos. I'm a decent python programmer and so can post-process headers out. Also, I don't like how OCR goes to *.doc files by default; I usually prefer working with straight text in this context, and the intermediate 'doc' files will require some thought for use in batch processing.All in all though, to sum up in one word: spectacular! Kudos to the developers.