CZUR Aura Pro Book & Document Scanner,Capture A3 & A4, Auto-Flatten & Deskew Powered by AI Technology, Foldable & Portable, Compatible with Windows & Mac OS

This is the first book scanner I have owned or used. It took a little while to learn how to use it but it was very worth it. The scanner can separate the facing pages of the book automatically. You can set the scanner to scan automatically instead of manually triggering the scan with the foot pedal. It will wait for you to position the pages correctly before initiating the scan. I found that to be amazing since sometimes when turning the pages I had to make sure I wasn't turning two pages instead of one and that took longer than just turning the page but the scanner waited until I finished checking and the pages were properly positioned with the finger cots before triggering the scan. I thought that auto scan was by timer, but it isn't. The quality of the raw scans is excellent. The laser lines that eliminate the curves from a scanned book work excellently. All the images appear flat. Editing and cropping is made easy by batch editing where the edit can be automatically applied to all the pages you select. You can also adjust the qualities of the images if you like, individually or in batch. I'm really enjoying my Aura Pro Scanner.

Given the price point, the Aura is a wonderful addition to your scanning equipment, especially if you scan uncommon dimensioned pages or books/booklets.1) The packaging was very professional, quite elegant and more than adequate to protect the contents. Amazon double boxes, so that's a plus.2) The overall UI is very easy to understand and utilize. There are only a few enhancements that I would like to see (mentioned later). The software performs pretty much flawlessly. I had a few user errors initially, which tech support cleared up quickly. It took about 1 day and about 4 hours of use to get the process down to where I could scan a book very fast.3) The equipment itself takes up so little room on your desktop, and you can leave the black mat permanently on your desk, as it doesn't get in the way and is very durable. I would even suggest that many scanner users simply put aside their old scanners and leave this one out for 99% of your work. Only when you need resolutions above 300 dpi would you pull out the older scanner.4) The software has many options, and I found that while the defaults were Ok, I preferred to increase the dpi and jpg resolution to better values, so as to ensure a higher quality output. This did not slow down the performance of the unit at all. In fact, the speed of the scanning process is amazingly fast; I would guess about 2-3 seconds when scanning both left and right sides of the facing book. Less than that for a single page.5) The included sidelights were very useful for glossy surfaces. Without them, the upper LED's cause a slight reflection; the sidelights did not. Very nice the way they mount too, quite impressive engineering.6) The "autoscan" feature is most impressive. It auto-senses your turning the pages, waits, then proceeds once the motion has stopped. Wow, makes it quite fast to scan 100 pages or more. This is one of my favorite features, and basically eliminates the need for the foot pedal.7) Suggestions: Mainly I would like to see some very simple UI improvements, such as: a) support for mouse scrolling while hovering over certain UI sections; b) putting more of the software "options" in one place. It can be a bit difficult to find them all, as they are generally buttons on each functional page, and you have to hunt the options down. For example, the default folder for storing the temporary scanned images - not on the main page, but on the scanner page, under a button in the top left. c) I would also like to see the user manual be updated, as well as a place on their webpage for general tech support library of user questions and answers. In many cases, it would be easier to search for a question, rather than emailing the tech support team. This would also free up their time for other things.

Since I purchased this I have scanned in over 15000 pages of sheet music using this. I purchased it because it was one of the cheapest that comes with a foot pedal and can handle A3-sized books.Overall, I'm glad I made the purchase. Though I've had a lot of frustration with its quirks. Most of all, the quality of the image is good, but not stellar. So if you're trying to scan in photos or something with more detail than just plain text I definitely recommend spending more money on something nicer.The other big issue is the software, which is very frustrating to use. It seems to be a different program entirely from the one that is bundled with the more expensive model. This one is barely usable, but the scanner will only interface with it. You're stuck with their software for the initial image capture no matter what.Pretty much every filter like B&W or grayscale does weird things to the image that are hard to describe. Every function like deletion and such requires a lot of clicking as well as a lot of figuring out how to work around the less-useful aspects of the program. For the most part this hasnt affected the end result enough for me to be mad about it. That's because I literally only care about the black & white music notation and not the cover art or anything.HOWEVER, I quickly learned to turn off all of the program's automatic adjustments. It's just plain awful at recognizing the finger cots that are provided. Using them leaves the weird shapes that are supposed to help the program identify and remove them. Instead it's better just to use white gloves and hope for the best. The program is also terrible at identifying the edges of the page. It constantly tries to cut pages in half or only scans one side or doesnt crop at all so there's a huge margin on one side. Now I just manually place the crop zones for the left and right pages. It's a bit slower but the end result is significantly more usable.In addition the laser page-flattening feature is clearly BS. The only editing Ive ever seen it do is to warp this crazy squiggle effect towards the inner sides of each page. This effectively makes the music unreadable in those areas. It did cross my mind that maybe the software was only created with typical text in mind, but when I tried scanning in novels and magazines I got the same result. This really makes me angry because there's no way to turn off the auto-flattening feature without turning every automatic feature entirely together.In the end I just use this to take raw images using manually-set crop zones, then I convert the file to black and white and such within Adobe. This takes a lot of time and somewhat invalidates the speed of this type of scanner. If you're trying to digitize massive amounts of larger-format documents for as little cost as possible then this scanner could be for you. If you can afford it, definitely go for a higher tier than this one. It will save you a lot of frustration.