Kodak serves up a scanner, lightly

KODAK HAS RECENTLY sent us the new and remarkably small i1220 pass-through desktop scanner. The interesting design gives it the smallest footprint of any desktop scanner, and it looks more like a small printer than a scanner.

In the box you'll find the scanner, a box containing a USB cable, power adaptor and an assortment of power cables for US, EU and UK plugs. You'll also find a detachable paper tray and a folder containing driver and application CDs, some cleaning equipment and an alarming thick manual. Unless like most oversized product manuals this one is not in multiple languages which is rather daunting.

Initial set up of the scanner is the usual very simple affair of connecting power and data and installing the software, and there is a quick set up guide included if you feel you need it.

As you can see, the unit itself is quite visually appealing and can tilt at to various angles to provide the easy access. It is very quick for something of its diminutive stature, scanning up to 30 pages per minute or 60 images per minute. Inside are two lamps per CCD camera which helps improve the 600dpi image quality and comes with what Kodak call Perfect Page image processing, which can help to de-skew images and automatically adjust brightness and contrast for each page scanned. For all the marketing spin, it seems to work very well, during our testing we never once had to adjust the settings and got impressive results every time with a variety of document types.

The software is what really lets this product down, it feels clunky to use. Setup involves installing four separate programs; the scanner drivers, smart touch software, ScanSoft PaperPort and ScanSoft OmniPage Pro. All of these programs add a lot of functionality and depending on how you intend to use the scanner you may not need to install all the provided software. This device is ideally suited to a small business of workgroup that need to digitise a number of documents daily for several reasons.

The Smart touch software allows you to quickly access functions to automatically configure the scanner and send the resulting to data to a variety of destinations according to predefined settings.

Omnipage provides a massive number of workflow and batch options, allowing you scan pages for a variety of functions such as OCR (Optical Character Recognition) or image recognition or to send the scanned documents to a variety of destinations, such as a network drive or email or a printer. From here you can also set up these jobs to recur on a given schedule and save the data in a variety of formats.

As we noted, the software feels cumbersome, with lots of features repeated in different programs, but we have to add that with regular use - and if you read the manual thoroughly - it may start to seem less like a chore. It should also be noted that this particular hack is something of a resource bandit and any peripheral that adds two new icons to my taskbar immediately gets my back up, especially when connected to my rather underpowered notebook.

We tried a variety of paper sources and the resulting output is impressive. Along with regular paper, the Kodak had no problem with business cards nor with very thin sheets of paper and handled a stack of 30 sheets of A4 without much fuss.

The i1220 is part of a family of four scanners, each slightly differing in terms of speed and quality and comes in with a SRP of £827. There is also an optional flatbed add-on if you need to scan fragile or bound documents. Another interesting point is that Kodak is offering this series with an unprecedented three year next day business exchange warranty standard. If you read the fine print, the scanner comes with a one year warranty with advanced unit replacement and a four day response time and you have the option to upgrade to the three year warranty, assumingly at no extra cost as long as you register the scanner for business use.

In Short
If you are going to be scanning a lot of documents on a regular basis, and especially if you need to process the results afterward, then this new series of scanners is definitely worth looking over, particularly if you can connect it to a reasonably specced PC, ideally a stand alone one if you need to perform large amounts of post processing like OCR. Also if you do purchase one of these, take the time to read the manual completely and thoroughly, you'll save yourself a lot of time and frustration. ?

[UPDATE: Kodak have emailed me to say that the 3 year, next business day replacement warranty is now the standard on this range]