Kodak i40 review

Kodak's i40 sheet-feed scanner is designed for office use where large volumes of paper documents need to be archived digitally.

Its input tray accepts up to 50 A4 pages, which are scanned on both sides at around 20 pages per minute (ppm) at the default 200dpi setting. This falls to around 11 double-sided pages at 300dpi, but that's still fast. However, we found paper handling to be unreliable, with thin paper going through two or three at a time and card not going through at all.

The supplied software can run on Windows 98 and above, but a Pentium 4 2.5GHz is required to keep up with the scanner's fast performance. Installation is tedious. There are four CD-ROMs for the drivers, ReadIris Pro 8 Corporate Edition optical character recognition (OCR) software, Kodak Capture Software and a Brightness and Contrast Control utility.

The TWAIN driver's black-and-white mode is welcome and automatic contrast handled faint text and coloured paper without problems. OCR is fast and reasonably accurate, with only a handful of incorrectly recognised characters in a 50-page document and successful preservation of formatting. The Kodak Capture Software is likely to see the most frequent use. It's possible to design profiles for specific jobs and it has various advanced features such as automated indexing and batch exports. However, it isn't the friendliest software and is likely to confuse office users who want quick results.

Image quality isn't up to the standards we'd expect, but it is fine for text and archiving images for reference. But paper-handling problems and unfriendly software affect the i40's otherwise impressive speed. It's also far too expensive. Fujitsu's SnapScan fi-5110EOX2, reviewed in What's New, Shopper August 2005, does the same job better for £250 less.

Author: Ben Pitt