Author Simon Williams of Trusted Reviews
Published 30th Jul 2008
Manufacturer Kodak
Price £310.59 (Exc VAT)
as reviewed £364.94 (Inc VAT)

Features Score 7 for Features
Scan Quality Score 8 for Scan Quality
Scan Speed Score 8 for Scan Speed
Value Score 7 for Value
Overall Score 8 for Overall

Kodak ScanMate i1120

Sheet feed business scanners lead a very different life from their home and photography counterparts. They have no glass flatbed, but instead work by feeding single sheets through at high speed, for archival and Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

Kodak's ScanMate i1120 is a mid-range business scanner, rated at 20ppm and duplex, capable of scanning both sides of the paper in a single pass. It has a conventional design for this type of scanner, with a near-vertical tray at the rear and a near-horizontal one at the front. There are just two buttons on the front panel, one to start a scan and the other, linked to a seven segment number display, providing 'SmartTouch' facilities - described further on.

The final button on the front panel, more of a catch, releases the scan head, which swings forward in case of paper jams, though we had no problems with jams during our review. At the back are sockets for the external, black-block power supply, a pity this couldn't be internal, and USB, to connect to a local PC. There's a power switch here, too.

Set up is pretty straightforward after you've clipped in the input and output trays. Paper feeds from the rear to the front of the scanner in a similar way to many inkjet printers, though it makes a fairly sharp turn out of the bottom of the scanner and onto the output tray. This means there's quite a bit of friction between each new sheet feeding out and the ones already resting on the tray, which leads to scruffy spreads of paper.

Loading paper is a little less intuitive than you might expect, too. The ScanMate i1120 considers the front of each page to be the one facing the back of the scanner, while the back of each page is the one facing forwards. Until you get the hang of this, you may end up scanning a lot of blank back sides ??" fairly sure there's a better way of putting that…

Kodak bundles a lot of industry-leading software with this scanner, including Nuance Paperport 11 for document handling and Omnipage 15 for OCR. This is the latest version of Paperport and the latest-but-one version of Omnipage, so you get nearly all the benefits of the latest feature-sets. There's also a copy of Presto! Bizcard 5, which handles the scanning of business cards and maintains a contact database of their details. At typical retail prices, this trio of support software alone would cost around £120, so you're getting a lot added value here.

Comment Rod Bennett said on 30th July 2008

Bought one of these scanners a few weeks ago and must say i am very impressed. I note concerns about mis-feeds etc but to be honest i have not had one and must have scanned over 2000 pages of varying quality.

Scanning speed is very good particularly compared to my HP officejet 6110 which allows you to make a cup of tea and read the paper by the time it has scanned just one sheet.

For a small business trying to cut down on filing space this is a great bit of kit.

Business scanners, designed for high speed conversion of paper documents to digital ones, can cost a lot, but Kodak's ScanMate i1120 comes in at under £400 which is comparatively inexpensive. The Lodak ScanMate is designed much like other sheet-feed scanners, with pages feeding from the near-vertical tray at the top, down through the device and out to an output tray that sits nearly parallel with the desktop, at the front.

To reduce the footprint of the scanner, Kodak has angled the downward path steeply, so paper has to make a sharp turn onto the output tray. This means sheets rub against each other and a batch can look pretty untidy by the end of a run. Both the input and output trays fold away when the scanner isn't in use.

The Kodak ScanMate i1120has dual scan heads, so one or both sides of a page can be scanned at once. Kodak rates the Kodak ScanMate i1120 at 20ppm and when scanning at 200dpi, suitable for archival as PDF files, we saw slightly more than the rated speed. It drops as the resolution increases, of course, and at 300dpi, the minimum needed for Optical Character Recognition (OCR), it's taking nearly two minutes for 20 pages.

There's a seven-segment LED display on the front panel of the scanner and the numbers from 1 to 9 refer to set scan modes, pre-defined as part of the smart touch system. Modes cover presets like low-res black and white, through OCR levels, to full-colour, 600dpi; the maximum resolution of the scanner. The modes are set by number with a front-panel button, so it takes just a few clicks to set up a scan. All modes are configurable, so you can mix and match for the settings you want.

As well as the software supporting smart touch, there are copies of Paperport and OmniPage, both industry-standard applications from Nuance and both in very recent versions. There's also Presto! Bizcard, which enables the scanning and storing of business cards. The software can OCR the details from a card or store its image in a PC-based album.

Although there's no multi-feed detection, and we did see a few mis-feeds, the quality of scans is generally good, with automatic straightening and image enhancement. Kodak's Perfect Page technology can identify photo and text areas and separately enhance both. In practice the scans we saw, whether scanning for archival or OCR, were readable and showed few recognition errors, though this may be down to OmniPage as much as the scanner.

Kodak - ScanMate i1120 features - Verdict

The Kodak ScanMate i1120 is a good general-purpose, sheet-feed business scanner. Being able to scan both sides of a page at once can save a lot of time and duplex scanning isn't always standard with scanners in this price range. Barring a few mis-feeds and an untidy output tray, there are few problems.

Article taken from http://www.itreviews.co.uk