CZUR Shine Ultra Pro 24MP Document Scanner, USB Book Scanner, Portable Document Camera, A3 Large Format Book Scanner, Adjustable Height, Max DPI 440, for Windows & Mac

About to start van life - I have a project on the road that I will need it for (and is the reason I bought it), but on a stormy day today, I started to digitize all my financial records to get rid of paper. . . in a marathon session, I got so much done! Half the clutter in my house is paper and financial and medical records. . . well on my way to no more clutter! Perfect results. . . . . it will do a straight pdf or a searchable pdf - the searchable pdf takes longer to process, but that is ok. I gave tech support only three stars because I didn't need it, and haven't tried yet. . . . it was pretty easy to learn - one 10 minute YouTube vid. It is FAST, but it doesn't scan until your hands have cleared the scan area and it can get a clean copy.

This product was ideal for my needs! I have numerous historical documents, photos, and other family history artifacts which don't always lend themselves to a flatbed scanner or copier. This product also comes with a software interface that is not only very capable in terms of functionality and features, it's also quite intuitive/easy to use without consulting help or a manual. It produces high resolution, professional quality images and the placement of items to image is very easy--you can view the image of the item on your computer monitor prior to imaging the item, and there is a foot operated switch you can use to capture the image when you're ready. It doesn't have any moving parts like a scanner, so the risk of mechanical failure is effectively zero. I am very satisfied with this product and highly recommend it! I generally don't write reviews, but this product was so good, I had to write this one.

This product is for non-laminated books and does not have the best field of view. The build quality and packaging is great, but the software could use a lot of improvement. It is hard to navigate the software and has very little in terms of post processing. Laminated books will have reflections from the built in light and even with the light off there will be reflections if the page is glossy. The field of view is fairly narrow meaning long books or large pages will not fit and there is no stitching function that I have found in the software to combine two scans into a single page.

This is the best scanner on the market. I give it a 10/10. Super customer support. I highly recommend this product.

I have a beautiful, very old and fragile book handwritten by an ancestor that I wanted to digitize into PDF format so that I could share with relatives. The device was easy to set up and use. After a brief review of video overviews, I was able to easily copy the entire book in a very short period of time without further damaging the book. The page flattening functionality worked well. As the book was written in German script, I did not attempt to use the OCR functionality. This device paid for itself in this one use. Otherwise, I would have had to ship off the book, risking loss and damage, and would have had to pay more than the cost of this device. It was a great answer to a task that had been nagging me for several years.

How bad is it you ask?? It is SO BAD that you will have to run two versions of the software package to access all the features when scanning books of any length. The new version sometimes offers the critically important "replace" a scan extra feature, but only sometimes, seemingly at random. But the new version CANNOT output longer (e.g. 200 page) OCR'd PDFs--it usually just fails, either crashing or saying it finished when it did not. If the new version does happen to work to produce an OCR'd PDF, it often sets the page sizes randomly, some pages are 5x the size of others. This is apparently unfixable.To output larger OCR'd PDFs you MUST use the old software--CZUR_Shine_V2.2.230531B. If all you have is the new version--CZUR_Shine_V2.2.240123--you will not be reliably able to make OCR'd PDFs of longer books. If you don't have the old version of the software in the box as a CD when you receive the product, or you can't mount a CD, return it immediately, it is unusable, at least for book scanning. Completely unusable!! I do not exaggerate.So you NEED to use the old version of the software to output bigger OCR''d PDFs. Their installers make it hard to run two instances of the software, but I got it done using a removable pen drive. Simply install one version on a pen drive, remove the drive and install the other version on a regular hard drive. Then plug the pen drive back into the computer and you have two instances of the software, old and new.I got one answer to one question from tech support, it was clear, the device has to be plugged directly into the computer, no USB hubs. Other answers have been of no value, just suggesting downloading the new software, which would be a terrible thing to do. The "Report a problem" function in both versions of the software where you should be able to submit an example of a problem image does not work, and is often not even offered as an option in the new version. A couple of the other "Features" with icons and described in the instructions don't work either, like adjusting the degree of curvature of the book pages. Sometimes it is grayed out, and when it is not, it doesn't work.The hardware is fine, even elegant, within its limitations. Everything about the software is glitchy, unreliable and unstable. Take images too quickly and you get a terminal blue screen of death along with a low frequency roar until you press the button to restart your PC or pull the plug. On some of these crashes it actually disabled one of my peripherals, I had to unplug it and reregister it, and scrambled my 3 monitor arrangement--these are hard, hard crashes. The documentation is terrible.You cannot use the built in light to scan any book with even slightly glossy paper, you either have to arrange a light at a grazing angle or use very diffuse lighting coming from an angle. This is an intrinsic problem of all of these scanners with only an overhead light. Very diffuse lighting might work, as in a library with many overhead fluorescent lights, but I have not tried this. Instead I use a light source aimed low over the surface of the glossy book. The built in lights work fine for matte books.You have to carefully monitor the image of each page you scan by looking at an extra large icon because some are terrible and must be replaced IMMEDIATELY. So you have to have a lot of monitor space--I have two 4K monitors I use at home, I cannot imagine scanning books with a single2K screen as with a laptop. If you don't detect the problem immediately and fix it, it is virtually impossible to repair with the old software and usually impossible to repair with the new software, except when on occasion the new version of the software offers the "repair" option, which is sporadic. Otherwise, you must start over from scratch, rescan the whole book. Yes, really, it is THAT BAD.The variety of ways that the software misfires is mind boggling! Sometimes it will scan all pages crooked for no apparent reason. Rotating the book to compensate does nothing. Relaunch the software and it will stop doing this, most of the time, but not always. The scans themselves can be fine for text but only OK for B&W photos--I have not tried it for color photos.I will say that after 8-10 hours on the learning curve, I can now usually get through a short book (150 pages, mostly only text) from start to finish in about an hour with acceptable results. This accounts for having to rescan 5% of the pages that don't scan correctly the first time, if I catch them on the fly. If not, it is start over from the beginning and one hour may become 2 or 3.Since it is the software that is so bad, all other CZUR products are likely just as problematic. And the competitors get even lower scores. I really don't want to have to go through all of them only to find that they are all terrible. I have ordered the even lower rated IRIScan and will review that. My fear is that both will have to go back. The clock is ticking.I guess the market is too limited for an American vendor to pick out an unit and make it actually work for sale to his or her countrymen. This is my plea to an entrepreneurial US tech person--help the world preserve history! This is what globalization has wrought, people, among other things.