Czur ET24 Pro first impressions

[cday]

I did destructive before and the results were really good. I'll have to get a good HFS cutter (prices seem to have doubled in the last year) and a new sheet feed scanner though. My current one has developed a dead pixel, so you get a white line down every scan. For documents it's okay but for books...

Couldn't possibly be a spec of dirt somewhere that could be removed, presumably you have checked that carefully? That can be a practical limitation of sheet feeder scanning.

I've been back and forth with Czur on email, and my conclusion is that it's simply impossible to get good results with this thing. Not what I would consider archival quality, at least. It's better than nothing, especially for books you can't destroy, but nothing of mine is that rare. The few things like that I do have I've already done in stages with a flatbed or using a camera, with results as good as this thing.

Although I only know what I have read, I think a modern smartphone, preferably mounted on a basic stand, and one of the better modern scanning apps might do as well as or possibly better than the Czur with its present software!

[aestetix]

Yeah I did give it a good clean, but no joy. Some consumable part, some roller or something, is coming to EOL anyway. It's a quick old ScanSnap.

You are right about phones. I've had good results with apps, even just taking photos hand held. The only real issue is curvature of the page, which can be mostly sorted with a sheet of plexiglass. Looking around some people suggest plexiglass for use with Czur scanners, but then it's going to take a very long time to work through a book with 1000 pages.

[aestetix]

The software is very buggy. The sorting window doesn't show all 1006 pages:

The UI is hard to use. It's some custom thing and bits of it are just broken. For example, drop down menus close without letting you select unless you keep the mouse cursor over the scroll bar when letting go of the button. The mouse wheel doesn't work in them either.

[aestetix]

Sometimes pages are randomly green.

[cday]

Sometimes pages are randomly green.

The image histogram shows 20 to 25% more green than red or blue, not really noticeable on my laptop screen, but LCD screens generally do not render colours very accurately.

Converting to grayscale and then applying a small levels correction improves the image:

green_grayscale_levels.png (89.17 KiB) Viewed 2260 times

The benefit isn't very clear unless the colour and grayscale images can be viewed in adjacent tabs in a viewer, or in quick succession.

The grayish shadow on the left could be removed with a slightly larger levels correction, at the cost of a possible a slight degradation in the equality of the text. No easy fix for the black marks at the top, other than cropping the canvas or pasting an area of white canvas over them. A levels correction, at least, could be easily batched if the images are generally consistent in appearance.

Off topic, I did some work with TI 9900/9995 16-bit microprocessors long ago, register-to-register architecture, assembler code, the only microprocessor I ever programmed.

[aestetix]

Yeah, it can ask be fixed with some work. The problem is that it needs so much work it's just impractical to do an entire book with over 1000 pages.

The frustrating part is that ScanTailor can do all this automatically. If their distaste software was better it would go a long way to fixing these issues.

I think the page warping can't be fixed though, the hardware just isn't capable because it only uses three lines.

[aku]

Yeah I did give it a good clean, but no joy. Some consumable part, some roller or something, is coming to EOL anyway. It's a quick old ScanSnap.

You are right about phones. I've had good results with apps, even just taking photos hand held. The only real issue is curvature of the page, which can be mostly sorted with a sheet of plexiglass. Looking around some people suggest plexiglass for use with Czur scanners, but then it's going to take a very long time to work through a book with 1000 pages.

I remember seeing something about that here ... Ok, found it on youtube again (The TIFLIC Book Scanner - Demonstration) and then searching for TIFLIC here yields the thread Original ~600pg/hr, very portable scanner now achieving ~900pg-1100pg/hr.

[cday]

Modern phones used with modern phone apps certainly have great potential, the practical issue as aestetix says is flattening the pages of books that do not easily open wide, so that there is less or no need to correct curvature.

Illustrations of book scanner designs do tend to show their use as in the linked design with books with bindings that allow that, unlike a typical paperback.

[TS Zarathustra]

I think if maybe you have too high expectations.
Scanning will never be as good as the original. I look at a successful scan as a scan that is perfectly readable, not something that is indistinguishable from the original.

[aestetix]

I think if maybe you have too high expectations.
Scanning will never be as good as the original. I look at a successful scan as a scan that is perfectly readable, not something that is indistinguishable from the original.

I don't expect perfection, but I do expect it to be readable. Clearly removing shading from diagrams makes them less readable.

The most frustrating part is that they could have made a much better product with a bit of effort. A simple V shape holder for the book, and a couple of cameras to photograph the opposing pages. Maybe a small V shape strip of metal to place in between the pages to hold them open and a bit flatter.

Or they could have used dot projection instead of 3 lines. Some phones with facial recognition use dot projection to get an accurate map of the contours of the face. It's clear that a lot of the issues with failure to properly de-warp pages is due to the limitations of the 3 line system.