Hello and welcome back. If you follow the channel, you know that I have been using
the CZUR book scanners ever since they came out with their original Aura model.
This is one of the rare Indiegogo campaigns that delivered what it promised and then some,
and literally saved our butts when we had to scan old IBM documents in a hurry. The scanner
has a major trick up its sleeve: it uses a laser line projector to automatically flatten pages,
which is a real life saver for us. No need to sacrifice a rare book by cutting its binding
to feed into a flat bed scanner. In fairness, nothing can beat a museum quality flatbed scanner,
but preserving the book is an invaluable alternative for us.
And needless to say, this is quick and convenient, takes no space when not in use, and far cheaper.
This time, I get to try the new ET24, which campaign has just started on Indiegogo. As you can
tell from the name, it just got more resolution, at 24 Mega pixels now. More pixels, more better,
as far as I am concerned! Quite importantly, it now scans at 320 dpi instead of 280,
which puts it over the magical 300 dpi limit, and makes it an acceptable source for museum scans.
This is the side lights. That's very important when you have reflective materials,
maybe we'll get to test it. Okay, that's the same foot pedal as before.
Yeah, slightly different color. The little button. That was a an improvement they made
for the 18 Pro. So you don't you don't have to click, you have a button that you can smash,
goes a lot faster. There are little things that you use on the side of your books:
press on the pages of the book on either side. And it removes them automatically from the picture. It
knows what it is, it has some recognition. I rarely have to use them with the type of
things I scan, because my stuff is large enough. And that's the main course, the scanner. Which
indeed looks like the older one. So I guess, the main goodie about it is the increased resolution.
So in this round, we’ll do a richly illustrated IBM pamphlet for warm up,
then move on to a far more challenging item. A treasure of a 1970 Fairchild catalog,
1200 bible-thin pages, written in very small letters. And for
desert we’ll do a hand-drawn schematic that wants to curl up. Let’s go for it.
And, same as before, you don't have to have a PH.D. to install this thing. The button goes where
it's marked "button". They have put a grippy surface on it now, so it doesn't fly around,
it stays put. So that's very good. USB cable goes there, DC cable goes there. And that's about all
the setup you have to do. And you can plug either the foot pedal or the button. I'll do the button
for the demo, and I'll probably switch to the foot pedal when I do the thousand of pages.
And I noticed there's a new port: HDMI. Okay,
that's probably to give - oh, it makes it a projector! Aha! You can use it
as - it's very vintagey - you can make it an overhead projector! Excellent, I like that.
And the software install is straightforward, except for one step: it asks you
about a serial number, and it's the one that's printed at the bottom of the unit.
Looking for device... It found it, it's there! So first up,
the IBM manual. This should be a simple one. And if you noticed, it just finds the outside,
adjusts the exposure, you have really nothing to do.
On this one, you notice it's little specular, it reflects a little bit. So that's a good
one to demonstrate the side lights. So I'm going to turn the side lights on,
and turn the direct light off, no more direct light. Ah, much better! It comes out much more
uniform out here. So that's what I'm going to use for this one. Okay, recognized it, done. Tada!
If it has a big curve like this, it's not going to be a problem at all. You just keep flippin'.
Not much to say about this easy scan. Just flip and click, it flattens,
separates and crops the pages for you. It was done in a matter of minutes. I did upload a
high fidelity version on archives.org, that clocked in at 175 MB, but frankly the normal
jpeg compression setting that yielded a 49 MB document was nearly indistinguishable.
So you can get it [at] high [magnification] pretty good. So that's the pixel level.
Yeah, you don't see much difference. So yeah, saving that as normal is plenty fine.
It’s important to know that the software includes a fairly potent optical character recognition,
so you can make you pdf documents searchable.
If you saw the previous videos, it pretty much did fine with anything I threw at it. Here for
example, I did not expect it to get this listing page very well - usually OCR struggles with
period listings. But surprisingly, not here, it even got my small listing mostly correct.
All right. Next up, the Fairchild catalog, which has all the good transistors from the 1970s. And
I was just repairing a machine that was full of Fairchild transistors,
and I couldn't find them on the web. And little did I know, I had a catalog,
it was in there! And I never scanned it. And so, after I repaired the thing, making guesses on the
equivalence of transistors, I found them. They had some transistors with little domes like this,
it was full of that stuff, those are the Fairchild transistors. And it turned out, I had all the
details! I could have replaced it with the exact correct resistor. If I had scanned the book,
I would have known! Oh well. So let's scan the book now.
Now that is thousands of pages,
this is going to be interesting. Oh, I hadn't noticed! They have added something that I wanted
for a long time! The hint tone, they call it, down here. Ah, it tells you if it got it! Fantastic,
that's going to be make my life way easier: I don't have to look at what I'm scanning.
Oh, this one is turning out to be super challenging, because
it's written right down the margin here. So I have to use the little yellow thingy,
and make sure I can see both the stuff on the camera. Because if it can't see it,
it's not going to be able to flatten it. So I have to make sure that I see everything. Let's see if
I scanned it correctly. I got it! Oh, it didn't remove the nib. Oh, I think it's because I don't
have enough of it in there. I need to include this portion on the page, right, or it won't see it.
All right, let's see... Yeah, it removed it! So it's because I didn't go far enough in. Okay,
good to know. So you can't be shy with that thing, you really have to show it to the camera.
And by the way, this thing is a treasure. I have never seen a book with
so many details about a transistor. There are curves for every single parameter of the thing.
So once I positioned the thumbs correctly, it went fairly smoothly, although it was
still slower than usual, as I had to carefully spread the book with the thumby thingies. Some
stuff down the middle I never got, as it was not even visible on the original. But that’s a
small price to pay for not sacrificing the book by cutting the spine, which I was not willing to do.
And voila, last one. And that took me
an hour and 20 minutes, including a couple breaks for filming. And
it's not too bad! I almost got everything, but not all the time. But doing it perfect
would mean breaking the book, and I don't want to do that.
So here we go, it's 1102 pages. Not bad!
So now, you want to make a searchable pdf out of it. So you go: 'searchable pdf'.
Oh, you want to select all the files first, and then make a searchable pdf out of it.
And here, the important thing to do, is to not use the auto-adjustment, but keep the original
image. I found it the hard way, that if you use the auto-adjustment, you'll get a smaller file.
But the original detail image will be replaced with a very low resolution black and white image
of it. And this is horrible, you just lose all the advantage of having scanned at high resolution. So
you want to keep the original image, and then you hit confirm, and off it goes for a little while.
And that is the scan where it's now searchable, so you can select the text.
So the beauty now is that it's searchable, and if i had
scanned it before, I would have searched my 2N5134 that caused me trouble in my previous restoration,
and found the page where it is. And I would immediately have known that it had a typical 8ns
rise time, and that the frequency was 400 megahertz
minimum - which is not at all what I found on the web! Anyhow, so now it's uploaded, you can get it.
Next up, is a scroll. That's a schematic, also that's not published. That's the one from the tape
drive of the HP 9825 that I have been repairing forever. Actually not from HP, it's a company
that apparently was hired to reverse engineer it. They had a few errors, I corrected it. But you see
the problem, that it's a scroll. So in order to do these ones, I use a piece of transparent plastic.
This is from a poster frame. And then you have to turn your side lights on and your
top light off, so you don't have a reflection. I'm going to slide this,
so it doesn't see [the reflection]. There we go. Better.
Slide it down, there we go.
One, two, three, go. Done!
Also worth mentioning for you, budding YouTubers and streamers,
you can use this as a regular camera. Here I was using it as a source in OBS,
and it could come in handy for filming schematics explanations and the such.
So like this, there you go.
It's just like a regular thing and then you can put the document on it.
And voila!
So here you go, new CZUR ET24 Pro Scanner, obviously I highly recommend it.
I would never have attempted a 1000-plus pages book scan without it. You can see
the results for yourself, I’ll put links in the doodely doo, and also a link to their Indiegogo
campaign where you can get them at a discount for a short while. See you in the next episode!
That's the 2N2222! I didn't realize it was so old!