CZUR Aura Pro Portable Book Scanner, A3 Document Scanner, Auto-Flatten & Fingerprint Removal Technologies, Multi-Language OCR, 90° Foldable, for Mac & Windows

The best scanner I've ever owned. Although it does not integrate with Apple's hardware directly in System Settings, the application works flawlessly and has a very nice software interface. It is FAST and ACCURATE... beyond what I was expecting. It has a very sleek look (even doubles as a desk lamp) and in good lighting conditions provides an excellent scan of paper and books alike. With poor lighting conditions, it still does a nice job. I am visually impaired and use the CZUR Aura to prepare music for transfer to my iPad for easier viewability. This has sped up my process significantly. I'm a fan!

I had some skepticism when I first ordered this. I was copying yearbooks and scrapbooks into my computer using a flatbed scanner, as I figured that my children and grandchildren would just throw them away after I was gone. I couldn’t be sure about that but considering their lack of interest in looking at these old books, I figured that it was a strong possibility. Anyway, I was scanning each page of a yearbook into a flatbed scanner, which was tedious, and I thought to myself there must be a better way of doing this. So I went online, and saw the Czur device, and I thought, “well for $300. You can’t go too wrong”. I ordered it, and set it up, which was easy.. The documentation that comes with the device is pretty sparse, but their are plenty of online tutorials and I quickly started using it. After an half hour of experimenting, I found that I could copy extensive year books in less than five minutes. It scans them into JPG format, and then converts them into a PDF, tiff, word document, searchable PDF, and some other formats depending on your preference. You can use a foot pedal, or switch on the automatic page turning recognition for scanning, either one worked fairly well for me, but I found that I needed to use the finger cots because some of the books were quite curved and I needed the foot pedal for those. I’m old, so , as mentioned, I had to go online to look at the video tutorials on how to use the finger cot, but once I did, it was very straightforward. Scanning takes only a second or two for each page and it can preserve them as I said, in any format you want, but I use the high-quality PDF, My yearbooks have a lot of photographs as of course, do the picture scrapbooks (which are mostly photographs) with some writing on them, but the device copied them faithfully. Naturally, for the photo scrapbooks, you don’t get the same picture quality as you would with a dedicated photo scanner like the Epson FF – 680, but you don’t have to take the pictures out of the scrapbook with the Czur. Most of the time I had to use the side lamps to copy the photo Books, as most of the pages were laminated or had a plastic cover sheet which creates a glare when the overhead lamp is on., When you turn on the device, the default scanning lamp is on the arm of the scanner. Those are easily turned off by touching the button on th back where the side lights are attached and that turns them off and the side lights on which reduces glare. The quality of the pictures are very good, as I mentioned, and if you don’t want to enlarge the scans to make a poster or something, then they are quite acceptable. All in all, this is a tremendous timesaver over a flatbed scanner, and I highly recommend it for people who want to archive their old documents, yearbooks, or scrapbooks.

Overall, this scanner is really good. If you are scanning text only books in b&w the results will be amazing. if you are scanning in color then expect mediocre, but still very acceptable, results. After scanning 22 books I believe this scanner is well worth the price.This book scanner excels in a few ways:1. Ease of use. I found no difficulty in setting up the hardware and using the software. The user face is easy to learn and reliable.2. Amazing scans for text only books. The scans of pages with only text (in b&w mode) are top tier. They flatten well and appear as if they where originally typed in word document or pdf.3. OCR works very well. With the OCR feature I was able to create searchable and reliable pdfs.4. Good Image capture. While the images captured on color mode look alot more like traditional scanned items, or just like pictures in general, this product does a good job of capturing and compiling them.Even so there are some drawbacks to this product:1. The scanner sometimes has issues with lighting large pages. This is for glossy pages while using the attachable extra light.2. In color mode, the scanner often cannot pick up large dark pictures. Or smaller dark colored pictures. These are turned into a cut off scan or a black silhouette. Sometimes, if you have a large single tone image (i find red to be the most problematic), the flattening and page capture features will fail.3. OCR pdfs take a long time to compile. While the benefit is great, i would still like to see faster compile times.4. In color mode, the scanner will pick up the included yellow page holders as they are thought to be part of an image.