CZUR Tech ET18 Pro - USB

desertcart.com: CZUR ET18 Pro Professional Document Scanner, 2nd Gen Auto-Flatten & Deskew Tech, 18MP HD Camera, Capture A3, 186 Languages OCR, Convert to PDF/Searchable PDF/Word/Tiff/Excel, Run On Windows & MacOS : Office Products Review: A very fast, efficient scanner. - I have thousands of documents and other paper items to digitize, including many oversized sketchbooks that my mom illustrated - these don't fit in a regular size scanner without doing multiple scans and stitching the pages together - which takes a lot of time with mixed results. The ET-18 Pro was a desertcart Lightning Deal and $100 off. So I decided to give it a try after doing some research and watching 3rd party reviews. I was very impressed with the packaging, very sturdy and well organized. The unit itself is very well made and sturdy. The side/auxiliary lights are perfect for eliminating glare. There are two triggers, desktop and foot. Both are well made and work well. Scanning is fast and the auto straightening is a fantastic feature, saves the effort of trying to align the page before each scan. Basically you can scan as fast as you can turn pages, change documents, the foot pedal really helps with this. I cleared one large file drawer that was FULL in just under an hour. I would not have gotten through 10% of that done with my flatbed scanner. Now for the software. As many reviewers have said, it is not the most intuitive and it took me a little bit to figure it out. There are a lot of features and I have not delved into many of them. So far I have not been able to find the way to scan directly to a PDF without having to convert from TIFF - which is easy enough and goes quickly, but it's one more step. Maybe there is a way to do this and I haven't figured it out yet. As I said, not the most intuitive. However, when it comes to quickly producing quality scans of books, magazines and oversize documents, the ET-18 Pro does a fantastic job. I have not had cause to use many of the features - searchable text, etc, I will as I get to scanning older documents with family history. Again, this is a very well made unit and well worth the investment, I imagine the software will continue to improve over time. Review: this is a serious case of "shut up and take my money!" - I got this scanner for humanitarian reasons: We're all out of space at home. Our house is filled with thousands of books, most of whom can just as easily be read in PDF, and the books keep multiplying when we're not watching... I was looking for a means of eliminating most of the physical books and replacing them with PDF files that I can then read on my tablet. Some books will have to remain: Reference books, certain textbooks, dictionaries... But most other books can be replaced with PDF files. And this is where CZUR ET-18 Pro comes in. It's a life-safer, it's a must. If you have too many books at home, just get it. Cons: - The scanner is not cheap. But if you take into account that you're recovering square feets in your apartment or house, the cost of the scanner becomes negligible. If you plan on scanning books (e.g., from a library or books borrowed from friends) then the scanner will pay for itself rather quickly. - The software that comes with the scanner is not of great quality: It will crash after scanning a large number of pages (between 450-500 seems to be the magic number). The solution is simply to save every 300 pages, and then use other software to combine the documents into a single book. - The software lacks many options that come with software made for other scanners. It's ability to edit the document is poor. The user-interface is not very friendly. - The documentation that comes with the scanner is rubbish. - There is a certain learning curve to operating the scanner and the software properly: You will need to learn how to switch between different options, e.g., for the cover of the book vs the inside. You will need to learn how to hold the book open using the plastic finger thingies that are provided. You will need to learn at what speed you can scan. This takes time, and you're going to mess up the first N scans. But then your hands and foot (yes, it's operated with a foot pedal) will get the hang of it, and your copies will come out perfectly. Pros: - Less than 1.5 seconds for scanning two pages. I don't know of any other scanner with this speed! - The foot pedal is pure genius. That said, the pedal is too light, and the cable is a bit on the short side. I'd rather they made the foot pedal much heavier so that it would be stabler... - The software, as clunky as it is, actually does a fantastic job when one needs to replace sheets, and this can be done in much less time and with no hassle. - The scanner lives up to its promise: You can scan a 350+ page book in under 10-15 minutes, and get a perfectly usable PDF file. - Even though the software lacks OCR for right-to-left languages (Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, etc), it does handle right-to-left documents well in terms of splitting and ordering pages in right-to-left books. - The scanner is very forgiving when it comes to page size: It handles page sizes from very small to A3! If you check youtube, you'll find ways of using this scanner for even larger documents, simply by elevating it a bit above the scanning surface, using, e.g., a small stack of books. The scanner lends itself to a crazy workflow & reading schedule: - I scan books at full speed - While I scan books, I'm listening to ebooks from my tablet - When I'm done scanning a book, I add it to my tablet. ☺ I've increased my rate of reading dramatically since I started using this scanner. My advice is to get yourself tiny rubber thingies you can place on your finger, to help you turn pages. They're dirt-cheap, available online on aliexpress and ebay, and will really speed-up page-turning. If you don't want to get these or can't find them, make your own by cutting a finger off of an ordinary latex glove, and using it to turn pages… In two days of casual scanning, I've managed to scan well over 20 books, and read 4. This is becoming my weekend hobby! If you love reading books, but are running out of physical space for all the books you've collected, you really owe it to yourself to have them scanned! You can fit thousands of books on a micro-sd card in your tablet, and carry your library with you!