Hello again. If you follow the channel, you know that we frequently scan vintage documentation to
preserve it and make it accessible. It often comes in odd formats, bound books and warped pages,
which adds to the difficulty. I previously acquired a CZUR Aura at the time when we had
to scan large IBM diagrams in a hurry. This scanner has a major trick up its sleeve,
as it uses a laser line projector to automatically flatten pages, which is a real life saver.
I liked it so much that I made a video about it. CZUR took notice,
and this time, I didn’t even have to buy the scanner, because CZUR sent me one for review.
This is their new high-end offering, the CZUR ET18 Pro. Which turns out to be perfect timing,
because I just have to scan HP and IBM manuals that are not available online.
There we go. K'sur, See'zur, whatever that is. Oh yeah, and also, same as the last one,
attention detail in packaging. Right there, looks more like an Apple product than a Microsoft one.
There you go it can read books like these,
and correct for the curvature - it has a little laser in it and, that's really, really helpful.
Oh, the food pedal has been upgraded! The older one was more like a mushroom thing,
so this is better. Oh so, that's the mat. Oh, the mat has been upgraded too.
Oh, the mat is better. This one sits flat. The older one, it tends to curl up. So that's the
other model. It works fine, but when I roll it up, it tends to keep a little bit of a curl.
So this one, it has some weight to it. It's flatter on its own.
This must be the side lights. Yeah, these are the side lights
and also I think they've been improved too, they use a wider range.
It looks like it's the same thing, but they have gone over all the details another time again.
And here's the beast. Here we go. Yeah I can see also, same thing, more more lights.
Thse must be the sensors, and this is the camera. Does it have?... Yeah,
so it has a little screen on the top where you can see your picture. That's the new one.
So they even give you a little button too! It's been improved!
All right, so that's the whole thing that's in the box: the improved foot pedal,
the improved button, the improved mat, the
improved side lights, hopefully the improved scanner. And a good old CD-ROM! So that's
perfect for me, because my computers are good and old too, and have CD-ROMs, yay!
And on the back it's not going to be very difficult: your button goes here,
so you choose the button or the pedal, that's your USB cable, and that's your
power, on and off. It's going to be a piece of
cake. So while the software is installing we can do the backlight. Hop, here we go,
done! Our installation has completed. Welcome! See, if I turn it on, what happens.
So it has a little screen on the top, but I should be able to see it also over here.
Scan...
Looking for device...
No? Not detecting it. So it found it all by itself, it just takes - its Windows seven, it
takes forever to install a driver, so it finally installed it. So first, the good thing, is that
this is a rather large format, this is bigger than the usual book, and it has no problem with it.
But it's not a book, so it might not like it. Nope. It just can't tell where the middle is.
So it's unable to deal with this, which is sort of weird. So I wish - that
happened also on the on the other device: it doesn't like binders like this at all.
And I wish there would be a way to indicate where the break is,
because it's looking for the shape of a book, and that doesn't have the regular shape of it.
Let's do an easier one. So this guy is a book,
like it likes to have. So this one is a pretty good example of why you need the side lights.
You see, the cover here is glossy ,and it's doing those reflections. And that's when you want to use
the side light over here. And I think you just - how do you turn them on? There you go.
And how do I turn this off? Still have some reflection. It's my own light, because i have my
my bench lights on. So that's another thing I noticed with the other one:
you want it to work just on its own light, you don't want to add any other stray light
when things get difficult. So now it's just using the light from the scanner itself,
and the reflection is gone. So let's try this one and see if it can deal with it being just
one page. It did! All right, so now is this it knows a lot better.
Done!
Done. So it's way faster than the older one.
Done.
Aha! The famous HP schematics! So that's going to require going to manual mode I suspect. I don't
know what it's going to do here. So that's the rub here. I can either go single page,
but then it doesn't do the flatness. If it's a book, it recognizes it, does the flatness thing.
If it's a single page, you lose the flatness control.
So that's sort of silly, the only way I can activate the laser flattening feature
is if I choose the facing page or book mode, which will also try to separate the page in two.
If I want to keep it in one page, I can use the single page mode,
but then it will not attempt to correct the flatness. So here for example it was
taken in book mode, and it corrected for the folds, but I have two halves of the schematic!
And usually when that happens I just put a piece of glass on top of it,
and I'm done with the problem. Well I was going to put a pane of glass on top of it, but
it exploded! So this is a tempered glass accident. It's a glass that's under a strain,
and it must have had a defect in there. And it just basically completely exploded between my
hands! There, some collected on top of the of the page, so that's going to be
our artistic test of the day, I'm going to try the color mode.
Not bad! Okay so don't use glass, use perspex. Actually a good method is to buy one of those
large poster holders and you just use the perspex plastic that's in the front that is a nice, flat,
usually non-reflective surface that you can use, and safer and lighter than glass. So here we go,
perspex from one of those poster holders or poster frames. Right, good enough!
Okay. Oh, there's a little suggestion feedback. So I'll give them the suggestion.
So there, I give them the suggestion: it would be nice if there was a way to flatten just
a single page. And we'll see if that works. All right! Suggestion sent.
Another thing I wanted to do is replace a single scan. This one was done in black and white, and
it's the cover page. So I'd like to do it in color. And I think I can do 'rep' or replace.
Which one to replace?
Oh, that's pretty good, iI want to replace the right. And yep, it's replaced, and it's in color!
Very good! Okay, now I want to make a pdf of it, except I don't want that particular picture,
so I selected everything and I removed that one. So let's do a pure PDF. PDF quality high.
And it's going to do a thing on my very very very very slow computer. All right, it's done.
All right, it did it.
So here's my pure scan version. Did it perfectly well. I tell you this is much better than
most manuals that you could find on the web. Uh, let's see what it did with the schematics.
Correctly made the bigger page and this schematic is completely readable , no problem.
So they really improved the background separation
with this new version. And the back cover in color, so very good that's fine.
There is also an option to create a searchable pdf, where it will OCR any text it finds.
While it does that, it also replaces the original bits of the picture with the text,
which reduces the size of the file greatly.
But I wish there was an option to preserve the original picture entirely AND make it
searchable. For now I could not find that, so I had to save both an original, non-searchable
,and a searchable version, which is annoying. Looks like I should make another suggestion.
And now, look at that, it's the same thing but you have text! You can select it.
You can search on part numbers, right?
Okay, and so now the third test would be to do the whole
OCR of the thing. Let's do one annoying page.
Okay, well, that's a good one. That's a very annoying page, right, it has drawings and text
and it's all over the place. Let's see how it OCRs that one. Okay, wow, that was quick!
And I'm not sure what OCR software they use.
My very new version of word, that's at the time where they would actually sell it to you.
Oh! That's pretty good. It made a table out of that, very nice.
It put the stuff all at the right place. The font is correct.
Now here's the original,
and here is the OCR. Oh, because that bit, it recognized as an image, so this is an image.
This is an image, and all the rest it made a text, and then it could not recognize this.
But other than that, I think it's - for something pretty annoying - it did a very good job.
And I also confirmed it has WiFi. And that's to pair with an iPhone or a portable device.
So it does actually have an app, and apparently to get it to work you have to scan the code.
Add ET scanner, and get it there, and here we go. Okay I got it, this is my picture.
It's a little bit weird though, like I can't delete it. Oh, I figured it out:
you have to click here, then you have to click there, and you have to delete.
Why is that, I don't know. It would be much simpler if you just tapped on it.
Okay, and if I do this and I click that, then I probably can rename. Yes! All right, it
can do it, it's just a weird and unusual interface. All right,
but so that works, you can scan directly to your mobile device.
Okay, so now the big job is the IBM scan, and since it really didn't deal very well
with the binder, here so I'll give them another suggestion. So: "Add a feature to draw a line
where the pages should be split. The software sometimes cannot find a split in the page".
So I ended up doing it page by page in the single flat page mode,
which worked quite fast. You just toss the page anywhere and it will find it.
So I just wish it would be able also to do the curvature correction in that mode too.
So parting words, how does it compare to the original? In terms of functionality,
it's improved in every way. It has a higher resolution,
the illumination is much more uniform, the mat is better, it's way faster. The older Aura though
still wins in the design department: look how slick it is! It's much nicer materials than the
newer one. Actually, this might be metal, or some kind of really high quality plastic. It
folds, which the newest one doesn't do. It also has more heft to it. The back lights
are not as good, but they hold much tighter. So in terms of design, I think they must have gotten
through cost reduction: this must have cost them an arm and leg to make. It's just so beautiful!
So if you like this style and the foldable thing, I think the original is still a spectacular
device. If you want the higher performance one, the [ET18] Pro is the version you want to get.
Thanks, see you in the next episode! And I will link the two scanned documents in the
doodely doo so you can judge for yourself. But in the meantime I am going to make a special
place for the new ET18 Pro, which I think is going to become my main rig for scanning.
Bye-bye!