I have little experience with this recently purchased scanner but it is fast. I use the supplied IrisScan DeskPro (+ Twain) software. The brightness setting, I have yet to master satisfactorily. Yes the pages are curled, even when held tightly, unlike a glass scanner, and the images need to be processed further, I think.
Yes there is OCR output in word and other which I have not used. Probably sufficient for occasional use as is the PDF editor PhantomFoxitPDFPro (149 Fr) or abbyFineSannerPro for Android (16€ on PlayStore which scans and recognises with a good recognition engine from a smartphone).
For intensive use, I recommend processing the images at the end of the scan with ScanTailor (free) and then with abbyyFindeReaderPro (15 or 14 or 12, paying, the best recognition under windows, less good with mac) which processes and recognises the images. HTM output recommended, then integration of html text into word to remove OCR slag.
Otherwise, free and open source image processing and OCR option, the ScanTailor -Tesseract - GimageReader trio, more difficult to install but also very good (on Github: linux, windows, mac).
Note that the software provided with the Cardiris 5.8 scanner requires an activation key which is normally provided by email with the registration, but I did not receive anything. I'm going to uninstall it, as it's not very useful for my purposes (card processing).