New CZUR ET Max: How I scan Vintage Manuals
Hello and welcome back. Well, it happened again, CZUR sent me their latest and greatest book scanner for review, the ET Max. Now, they didn’t pay me for the review, nor did they ever ask to check what I’m about to say about it, but I sure get to keep the scanner. Hehehe, good for me, because I have been using CZUR scanners ever since they came out with their original Aura model in their first Indiegogo campaign, and delivered all they promised, and then some.
[Marc] Hello, if you follow the channel, you know that in the course of my work, I do a lot of scanning of old technical manuals, that I'm rescuing. And for that I have been using the CZUR book scanners. I currently use two of them. For the most serious jobs, I use the ET 24, 24 megapixels book scanner. And when I have something quickly, I have this one always on the bench. So, if it's a quick, job this one will do. This one uses a laser to flatten the pages, this one uses just vision technology, so it's less precise.
But this one is kind of set in 2 seconds, and takes no space, so it gets used too. But technology marches on, and they just sent me a new one. So, this one is supposed to be 38 megapixels, that's the CZUR ET Max, I think. This one being the CZUR ET24, so you go up from 310 DPI to 410 DPI. So today we're going to try to save this old manual. It's full of really small lines, and half-grayed stuff. And also, I want to try on pictures, because they say the pictures have been improved.
And although text and graphics has been the forte of this one, pictures is not its best feature. And as you can tell, I have tons of manuals, they are all loaded on archive.org. So if you want a peek at what I have scanned so far, it’s all at archive.org/details/@curiousmarc, link in the doodly-doo. These are the lights This is the big Kahuna. So, in the package, apart from the scanner of course, the mat, the cables, power supply. That's the side lights. That comes in really handy
when you have glossy material, maybe we will have to use that. These are the finger cots, handy when the books don't cooperate, and you have to hold the pages. And it recognizes the marks on the side, and takes them out of the picture. And then, two buttons. Of course, you can use your mouse, but it's easier to use that, or the foot pedal.
So, at the back of it, there's not much to it. There's the DC power supply, there is the USB cable, one of the two buttons you have, you have an HDMI function. and on off. There is really nothing, except the model number is down there. You need that when you install the software. So the first time, I looked for a while.
And then the backlight is magnetically attached. And we remove the packaging, there we go. All right. And let's see if it found it. So, on the application, nothing special, just enter the serial number that's on the bottom of the scanner.
Oh yeah! This is the first time I'm running it, so I have not tried anything, this is all real life discovery here. Let me grab my first manual. See if the... oh, and this one, you see right away, it has some glare! So, when you have glare, that's when you turn the side lights... let me turn down these guys, off, then you use the side lights. And I still have a glare, because it's from my own lighting, let me turn that off.
All right, and the glare is gone. When you have those problems, you have to use the light from the CZUR itself, not from anything else. So, let me make some light from somewhere else, that won't interfere. There we go. All right, so that's our first frame here. And for this one, I'm going to use the "single flat page".
And, my favorite feature here, the hint tone. Oh, that's loud! It tells me when it got it. So, okay, got it. This one is not very curved, so that's going to be an easy peasy one. So what I do in these ones, and for most of the book, I am going to change for "facing pages".
So it's going to hopefully find the middle of the book, and separate the pages. They are here, I don't know if you can see them. So, over here, you see, it has separated the pages. And then we keep flipping.
And I'm probably going to change for black and white over here. I'm going to change for gray scale, because there's no color information. It's going to make the scan a little bit smaller. Oh, this one is a well behaved book, I don't have to spread it with the finger cots.
And, I don't know if you see it on camera, but when you scan something, the lasers come in really quickly. See, the red laser lines? And that's the ones they use to flatten the book pages, and it works incredibly well. In the previous review, I had a book that was extremely curved in the middle, with stuff right in the middle. And it got it all. All right, so we keep going until we end up in the more difficult part, where we have spreads. Okay, so we have arrived at the annoying section, the one with the fold outs. And, so, it's interesting. If I do this, is it going to take it?
Probably won't, because it needs to recognize something that looks like a book, like this, but terminates here. I think it will mess up this page. It didn't! Ha! Look at it, it flattened this one. Nice!
So, this is entirely flattened. And it didn't make a mess with the one that was there before. It just cut it at the right place. So it recognized that one. And, let's see what it does with this fellow, which has an inverted curve. That one should throw it off completely. Let's give it a shot, because this one only goes on two pages, it's not a super long one. Yeah, did it! Yep, flattened this one. And what did it do with that one? Yep, it did correctly.
This one is a double page, but there's nothing there, okay. So let's see if it can deal with that guy. I'm interested to see what it's going to do. Well, but actually that's not what I want. So, that won't work, because we want the whole page here. So, it was able to flatten it up, but it just cannot connect the two. I wish there was a setting for that.
So, I'll do a flat single page, and then I'll just put something on it to flatten it up. So, this is from an Ikea poster frame, and just put that on top. Now it takes my whole bench, and then you put that on top.
And now, of course, you have the reflections of the light. So, that's where you go back here, and you turn the light off. And I go click. I wish there was a way to flatten it automatically. It can, it has the laser, but for long pages like this, there's not a setting that allows you to keep the two things on the same page.
Which is a problem that's very specific to the type of stuff that I scan. I'm not sure that I'm enough of a market for them to go after this feature. And here we go.
And then we keep on doing our very annoying task. And I also always like to have the back of the manual. All right! And we're going to go back, and now, save it. And before we save it, I'm going to select everything, and do a searchable PDF, in English.
And here, image processing mode, you want to do "keep original image". And then I do "confirm". And I will just put it on the desktop. And I'll upload it, I'll put a link to it, so you can check the quality for yourself. Okay, it's done. Let's see how it did.
Oh man, I didn't... uh, I have to fix that. I didn't move it in the right direction. That's the inside page. Yeah, yeah, it's text, right? So it's recognizable. Schematics that fit in one page, what about that! Not cut up in pieces.
It got the text here. C25, yeah, we got that. It got C25 over here, it got C25 over there, actually C254, C25 over here. So it found it in the picture. So I can look for a specific component, and it found it throughout the document. Pretty cool! There you go, and that's about all the detail there is in the original.
And it did pretty good. Less artifacts than in the previous model. So everything has been improved, basically. More pixels, more better. And, okay, let me upload it on archives.org. And I have about 75 uploads already, most of them made with a CZUR of some kind. Upload and create your item, so you'll be able to look at it. And we get this one, one of my latest acquisitions.
It's a piece of the Space Shuttle, a little indicator. Actually, very similar to the Apollo stuff. So, those little barber pole indicators from the Space Shuttle. And I got a nice certificate with them. I'm sort of interested to see how it comes out. And we will do color. Do a click.
And, let's see, I do "non filter", then we get no processing. That's probably better. And "Antiquarian", I have no idea what that is. And "Patterns". I have no idea what it is either, but they're all image processing things. Okay, let's see what we got. So, this one. So this one has some processing in it, because the background is nice and has been made white.
Yeah, you can still see that it enhances contrast. And that's the one I took with, I can't remember, "non filter"? This one has no processing on it, so this is just like a camera picture. Ah, much better, okay! And, yeah, this is the best result so far. Now you have to contend with, that there's a crease in the paper up there, and then you see it, right? It's an actual picture, there's no processing.
And then, let's try with the light antiquarian processing, which I think is this guy. That is very similar, you can't tell the difference. Okay. But it's way, way better in the picture quality than it used to be. It's totally fine now. That's the full setting, optimized for text recognition. That is the non-processing, before I used the backlight.
That is the "Antiquarian", which I think is in-between the two. This is what they call "Pattern", which brings out the paper stuff. And then, this is the no-processing, with the backlight, and slightly processed with the back light, Antiquarian, which is probably what I would use. Okay, so, there you have it. Later... Well, wouldn't you know it, a new manual showed up. That's the manual
for this beautiful piece of equipment, this HP camera, oscilloscope camera. So this will give us the opportunity to demonstrate the page flattening feature, which is one of the best features of this scanner. And the second page, I'm going to use the finger cots, because it's not behaving. I really don't like the new finger cot thing. It used to work so well. And know, it gives a very visual, very visible, there you see where it was. All right, back with a page with fine gray scale. So, I go with no filter. Yep, that's fine.
There we go, manual with a big bad finger cot that's not properly removed. Not sure what's up with that. Same here. It's really too bad. You can see it here. And once again, that didn't use to be the case, that used to work flawlessly. I'm not sure what happened. Anyhow, the pictures turned out to be very nice. But once again, so, you can either get the pictures nice, or you can get the white background, but not the two at the same time. I wish there was a setting that did both. You can tell, when I scan in into the regular mode, the normal mode, then the background is nice and white.
And then when I switch the picture mode, the picture is much better, but I get some gray nonuniform background. Better, but not perfect. Anyhow, that's what you get. So that's the large schematic, came out perfect, and the back cover. All right, up it goes on archive.org. So here you have it, the new CZUR ET Max. It really shines scanning bound text books, and the
picture quality, which used to be its Achille’s heel, has been much improved. But as you can see, when you start to stretch it beyond what’s it’s made to do best, you can run into limitations. I’m not sure what happened with the finger cots removal feature, that used to work absolutely flawlessly - I hope this will be fixed in the final product. Also, I wish it could flatten the long HP schematic pages without attempting to break them apart, but I’m not sure how many people will run into that. You can thank CZUR for the many manuals I uploaded on Archive.org. The Kickstarter for the new ET MAX is going on right now, which will give you a big discount if you can snatch up one of the first units, link in the doodly-doo. See you in the next episode!
2025-02-18 00:08
