You can scan printed pages and turn them into editable text using your phone easy enough. There are plenty of free apps that you can use for that. However, if you need to do the same thing for an entire library of books or other documents, though, that’s probably not going to make for a fun experience. For those times, you need a dedicated book scanner and the Czur Et Max does that with a lot more panache than your typical offering.
Styled to look like a desk lamp, the device comes with a camera on the head that can scan whatever you place beneath it. More importantly, it brings a lot of features, such as auto-alignment and smart paging, that can speed up your scanning process, allowing you to scan entire books in mere minutes.
The Czur Et Max consists of a lamp-like device, with its main head situated at the end of a 90-degree arm. The head houses LED lights and a 38-megapixel camera that allows it to both illuminate and scan any pages you place underneath. It records those images in 7,168 x 5,376 resolution, which equates to a 410 dpi, allowing it to capture hi-res digital versions of any printed matter you want to scan. According to the outfit, it can take a scan of whatever you place underneath in just 1.5 seconds, allowing you to finish a book in pretty short order.
What makes it special, though, are the amount of features that allow you to streamline the entire scanning process, with no need to painstakingly line everything up each time out. It has auto-alignment, for instance, so everything will scan correctly even if you set down a page at an uneven angle, as well as finger removal, so it will automatically erase your fingers if it’s captured in the frame. The software can also perform background cleaning, trimming, and auto-cropping, so everything looks clean and presentable.
The Czur Et Max comes with smart paging, so you can scan both sides of an open book at the same time, with the device taking care of separating them as different pages. It also has Laser Curve-Flatten technology, which automatically flattens those curved pages captured when scanning spreads of books and magazines, ensuring you get distortion-free scans each time out. In case you’re scanning glossy pages, you can even turn on an integrated sidelight that reduces any reflections caused by the shiny paper material, so they’ve practically covered every possible problem you’re going to encounter.
The device comes with both a hand button and foot pedal, both of which should come in handy when you’re scanning pages one after another, while the accompanying software offers an advanced OCR function that can turn your scans into editable text files. According to the outfit, you can even use the scanner as a webcam, in case you want to record or livestream whatever items you place underneath (e.g. you’re doing a Pokemon card opening stream), with an HDMI port available for streaming those large video files. The device is compatible with Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for the Czur Et Max. You can reserve a unit for pledges starting at $499.
