CZUR ET16 Plus - Review 2022

The CZUR ET16 Plus ($429) is an atypical scanner, defective a flatbed and a document feeder. With its browse unit residing on a beam extending well above the scanning area, information technology looks rather similar a desktop lamp. It is an overhead scanner, and of the models we've tested, information technology most resembles the Fujitsu ScanSnap SV600. As such, information technology is versatile, able to browse documents, books, and some 3D objects. In my testing it didn't come close to the book-scanning speed the company claims, but it is faster than other book scanners we've reviewed. Its blend of speed, features, and versatility earns it our Editors' Option.

The Volume Scanner Landscape

Book scanners come up in several forms. In that location are flatbed book scanners such as the Plustek OpticBook A300, with a platen that extends to the very edge of the scanner so that one tin place a page flat, with the facing page and the rest of the book hanging over the scanner'southward edge. Then there are V-shaped book scanners, generally made for the professional market place—libraries, athenaeum, and the like—in which you place a volume face-upward in a Five-shaped fold, and information technology'southward photographed with a digital SLR camera. A prime example is the Atiz BookDrive Mini, though it is relatively expensive at more $half dozen,000, and that's before y'all buy the photographic camera. Overhead scanners such as the ET16 are both relatively fast and reasonably priced.

Light Information technology Up

The ET16 Plus is a matte-black scanner. The main function of the unit consists of a base from which sprouts a vertical colonnade, which ends at an arm that contains lights and the scan unit (a 16MP CMOS sensor). It measures 15.4 by 8.seven by 14.eight inches (HWD) and weighs iii.iii pounds. The successor to the CZUR ET16, the ET16 Plus adds side lighting, with boosted lights at either end of a beam that tin can be placed most halfway upward on the pillar that holds the scan unit itself. On top is a tiny brandish, which shows y'all an image of the object existence scanned. At the base are four silverish-colored buttons, which tin can be used to launch scans and adjust the lighting. An included black mat, which acts as the browse bed, fits at the scanner'due south base. Usable scan surface area is well-nigh xi.5 by sixteen.5 inches, and standard resolution is 250 dpi.

In back of the base are the power switch, too as the ports. Connectivity to a computer is handled via USB ii.0 with an included cable. Also included are a scan button and foot pedal, either of which can be connected to a second USB port in back of the scanner. The ET16 Plus also comes with two "finger cots," which y'all can place on a finger or thumb to help flatten a volume and hold the pages in place. The finger cots have a blueprint printed on them that renders them invisible in the scanned pages.

Robust Software

To get together the ET16 Plus, you attach the side lighting to the pillar, and position the mat beneath the unit. Then you'll need to install the software from an included disc, and attach the scanner to your computer via an included USB cable. (The software on the disc is Windows-only, only Mac drivers are available for download from the CZUR website.) When you start the software, the get-go screen that comes upwardly gives you two choices: Scanner and Visual Presenter—the latter choice lets you lot project an epitome of the scan area using a projector attached to one of the ET16 Plus's USB ports.

When you click on the Scanner option, you are taken to the main scanner interface. In the screen's upper left corner are more choices: Scan, Export, and Batch. Clicking on Browse takes you to a screen that displays a view of the scan bed and any document or other material it may contain. On the right side are radio-button menus that let yous select between choices for color mode (Color, Patterns, Stamps, Grayscale, and B&W) and processing method (Apartment Single Page, Facing Pages, Manual Option, or No Processing). Beneath them is a toggle slider that lets y'all enable or disable Auto Browse, and below that is a button to launch scans.

On the left side of the screen is a vertical carousel, showing thumbnails of scanned pages (if whatsoever), along with counters for the number of pages scanned and candy. In that location are upwards and down arrows that let yous advance forward or backward a thumbnail at a time or go to the end or first of the scanned pages. Fortunately the icons readily identify their functions, because when y'all hover over i, a description pops up—in Chinese. Other than that, there are no linguistic issues of note—the usual manual and assistance page are in reasonably good English.

The Export tab lets you select pages, with their filenames (with checkboxes next to them) listed down the correct-hand edge of the screen. There are also checkboxes that let you check all pages, or only the left pages or the right pages of two-page spreads. Once yous have chosen the pages y'all desire to export (all pages are initially saved as JPEGs), yous can select a format: OCR, PDF, Searchable PDF, or TIFF. The software volition then convert the pages into the format you've chosen and combine them into one file. It volition also open File Explorer, where you lot can name and salvage the new file.

With the Batch tab, you tin can perform various operations on a group of scanned pages, including adjusting color style, rotating, cropping, deleting, renaming, and printing.

CZUR's software is a cocky-independent program and overall is reasonably well designed, though there is a learning curve, and yous will have to refer to the user transmission to meet how to perform various functions.

Diverse Scanning Abilities

According to CZUR, the ET16 Plus can scan either a single page or a two-folio spread in about 1.5 seconds—40 spreads or 80 pages per minute for books and magazines—saving each page as a JPG file. (For ii-folio spreads, the software volition separate the pages.) Yous can then put the pages through an boosted OCR pace and relieve them as a Word or searchable PDF file.

Using the scanning plan that came with the ET16 Plus, I scanned a variety of documents, including text pages, books (some containing colour art), magazines, and solid objects. It did reasonably well in scanning color fine art pages to JPG, which I so combined and converted into PDF. Colors were vivid, although the true hue was non always reproduced. Solid objects were a mixed pocketbook; you want to stick to non-reflective objects, or the scanner's lights could produce unwanted glare spots. (Similarly, you don't want to use the ET16 Plus in a brightly lit area, and yous want to avert placing whatsoever distinct light sources to a higher place it.) Besides, solid objects should exist less than an inch tall. Note that the scans you lot get of these objects are standard 2-dimensional JPEGs and not 3D object files for 3D press or blitheness.

For speed testing, I scanned a 32-page blackness-and-white newsletter, consisting of sixteen two-page spreads. I did some testing using Auto Scan—which automatically scans a spread when the software detects that the pages are in position, and then scans again whenever you've flipped the folio and positioned the new spread. I also used the human foot pedal to scan; I'd position a spread to my liking, and and then printing the pedal, and it would scan.

As they are generated, thumbnails of the scanned pages announced in the left margin. A spread volition initially evidence equally 1 large page, and then as ii separate thumbnails as the software processes each page. Once the browse is complete and all the images have been processed, you can convert the scanned JPEG images to other formats.

Whichever method I used, the trickiest matter was timing it so that I didn't plow the page before the scan was completed. In the PDF files for two of our test scans that I did using Motorcar Browse, I noticed that pages were missing—perhaps it was a spread that I had turned before the scan was complete, or a spread that the software was not properly able to marshal. Whether scanned automatically or triggered page past page, a scan will only be equally skilful equally i'south ability to smoothly turn the pages. (They don't have to be exactly aligned, thanks to the CZUR software's corrective abilities I did about a dozen scans of the newsletter, most using the pes pedal to browse spreads, and I got somewhat more efficient as I got more experience scanning.

In my official time test, after this training catamenia, the ET16 Plus scanned and saved our sixteen-spread, 32 page document to JPEG format in 4 minutes, 39 seconds. This comes to seven pages per minute (ppm), or eight.6 seconds per folio, with an boilerplate time for setting up and scanning each folio of seven.5 seconds, a far cry from the i.v seconds per page cited by CZUR but faster than the similarly designed Fujitsu SV600, which took 2 minutes, 45 seconds to scan and salvage five two-sided pages. It's much faster than the Plustek A300, which averaged 12.2 seconds per folio (including prescan time).

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For OCR, I scanned our standard seven-page test document—each folio showing a font at sizes ranging from iv points to 20 points—first into private JPG files and so exported them to a Give-and-take file, all from within the ET16 Plus'due south software. Its performance was solid if unimpressive. It scanned our Times New Roman test page at sizes downwardly to 10 points, and our Arial examination page at sizes down to half-dozen points, without error. It did reasonably well on 2 standard simply less common fonts, and poorly on the iii exotic fonts in our suite.

Proceed Zeal Until Real

CZUR was founded in 2022 in Shenzhen, Mainland china, and raised a lot of money on Indiegogo to fund the product'southward predecessor, the CZUR ET16. The company sells to the United States market through Amazon, and its products mostly receive very adept reviews on the site. CZUR's own site offers assistance resources and a downloadable user guide. The proper name CZUR is an acronym for "continue zeal until real." With the ET16 Plus, CZUR has succeeded at that.

The CZUR ET16 Plus can scan a variety of material, but is probably best every bit a book scanner. Selling for considerably less than the similarly designed Fujitsu SV600, information technology proved faster in our testing. Information technology's also a lot quicker than flatbed volume scanners, in which you have to elevator the cover and reposition the volume before scanning each page. Although there'southward some learning bend to CZUR's software, it did a decent task straightening out crooked pages and other defects earlier saving them as scans. If you're in the market place for a book scanner, it earns our superlative recommendation.