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

Tried several scanner and this was my favorite so far. It offers the ability to just lay it out and click a pic easily. I scan a variety of things from ads, to books, to old ephemera. Because each is unique and different sizes I required to be flexible. To my surprise it really is. It's fast, accurate and always multi-use capabilities. Works well with MacBook setup without any issues, no compatibility issues. The software interface was great. The foot pedal feature is a breeze to use. The scans are sharp and crisp with the ability to change outputs and settings. The colors were clear and clean. I like the 2 sided scan for postcards and photos.

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.

The scanner itself is a beaut. Attractive design, not overly large, a choice between very bright top-down lighting or glare-reducing side lighting, and good resolution. The desklamp mode is a bit silly and I never expect to actually use it in that role, but I suppose it's a nice-to-have. Setup takes a lot of deskspace, but nearly all of that space is usable for scanning larger documents and books. The OCR works wonderfully on type and very poorly on handwritten cursive (have not tested handwritten print). The little "finger cots" used to hold down pages are a nice addition. Two of us were able to scan in an entire 400+ page recipe book in only about 2-3 hours without damaging the binding. Their curve-flattening algorithm was really putting in work. The footpedal makes scanning possible for one person, but I'd recommend that you get two people working at once so that one can catch/fix any problems while the other is preparing the next scan. Goes a bit faster that way. I can't really comment on computing performance other than to say that the software ran just fine on an old i3-5010U laptop and took what I would consider to be a reasonable amount of time to process OCR and image adjustments. Only bad thing I have to saw about the hardware is that the side-lights tend to create a sort of gradient where the top of the page is slightly brighter than the bottom. I don't know that there's a way around that without bringing back glare, though.The software is what really holds this unit back from 5 stars. The finger cots do not always get erased from the scan. Hitboxes (that is, the area that actually registers as a click) for various buttons are a bit off from the graphic (if I hit the lower-right corner of a checkbox, it will not actually check the box). Buttons must be pressed on the graphic and not the label (for example, in order to click the "back" button you must click the image of an arrow as clicking on the typed label "back" like it's a hyperlink will do nothing). Edge detection goes wonky sometimes (particularly if there's a dark image at the edge of the page, so the contrast between it and the black mat isn't great). These are all small things that can be an annoyance, but do little more than adding perhaps 15 minutes to a 2-3 hour scanning session if you're checking the scans for accuracy as you go.All told, I would recommend this scanner if you've got books or large documents to scan. For normal 8.5X11 scans, I reckon a more traditional flatbed scanner would be a bit quicker and just as high quality.