Almost identical in most ways to the Kodak i2400 ($845 direct, 4 stars) that I recently reviewed, the Kodak i2600 ($1,195 direct) offers three key differences. It's faster, with a 67 percent boost in rated speed for the 40 percent jump in price. It has a higher capacity automatic document feeder (ADF), at 75 pages instead of 50. And its three row by fifteen character LCD shows scan profile names instead of just numbers as you scroll through the choices, a feature that makes it far easier to take advantage of one-button scanning, and should be (but sadly isn't) standard.

The boost in speed is enough by itself to justify the difference in price. Combined with the higher capacity ADF and twice the recommended duty cycle (at 4,000 sheets per day) it makes the i2600 suitable for even heavier-duty scanning. So where the i2400 is a potential choice for an individual, small office, or workgroup, the i2600 is more definitively a small office or workgroup scanner, and a particularly good fit in either case.

Basics

Setup is typical for a document scanner. As with the i2400, however, one notable touch is that the scanner comes out of the box in what Kodak calls a storage position, with the trays closed and the scanner itself vertical relative to its base. To use it, you have to rotate the body, with the bottom coming forward. You can also optionally pull out the trays. When you're not using the scanner, you can return it to the storage position, which gives it a 13-inch-wide by 6.3-inch-deep footprint.

If you need a flatbed as well as an ADF, you can add one of two choices as a separate companion scanner add-on. At this writing, Kodak sells a letter-size version ($495 direct). However, the company says that a tabloid-size (11- by 17-inch) version ($1,428 direct) will be also available, probably by the time this is published.

The scanner comes with highly capable software, most notably Nuance PaperPort 12 for document management and Nuance OmniPage 18 for optical character recognition (OCR). In addition, it comes with Twain, ISIS, and WIA drivers. Between them, the three drivers will let you scan directly from virtually any Windows program that includes a scan command.

The i2600 also comes with same two scan utilities as the i2400. One installs along with the drivers, and is the one I used for all of my official test results, since it's effectively the default choice. The other installs from a separate disc. Count this as an embarrassment of riches, since it's not clear why you might choose one over the other.

As I noted in the i2400 review, the disc sleeve for the second utility refers to a Software Overview Guide that's supposed to help you choose between them, but the Guide wasn't packed with the scanner, which only leads to confusion. Kodak says the guide is actually available online, and the company is planning to fix the misstatement on the disc sleeve. In any case, choosing between the utilities really depends on which one you prefer using for your particular scan applications.

Performance

The i2600's biggest strength is raw speed, which lets it chew through a stack of paper at a fast clip. Kodak rates the scanner at 50 pages per minute (ppm) in both black and white and grayscale modes at the default 200 pixel per inch (ppi) resolution. That also translates to 100 images per minute (ipm) for duplex scanning, with one image on each side of the page.

For simplex scanning to a PDF image file, using our standard 25-sheet test document, I timed the scanner at 41.7 ppm, a bit short of its claimed speed, but impressively fast. For duplex scans of the same document, it slowed down a hair, to 76.9 ipm, or 38.5 ppm. Both speeds are notably faster than the i2400, which came in at 28.3 ppm for scanning in simplex and 53.6 ipm for duplex.

The speed looks even more impressive compared with the Editors' Choice Canon DR-2580C ($875 street, 4.5 stars), which is rated at 25 ppm and 50 ipm, and which I timed on the same file at 25.4 ppm and 49.1 ipm.

Unfortunately, however, if you scan to a searchable PDF file, which is generally the more useful format for document management applications, the i2600's advantage over the DR-2580C disappears. The issue is that the Kodak scanner adds time for the OCR step, while the Canon scanner doesn't. For the same 25-page, 50-image file the i2600's total time for scanning, recognizing the text, and opening the file, was 1:16. The Canon DR-2580C took just 1:01.

Also in the category of performance, the i2600 did a reasonably good job in our OCR tests reading our Times New Roman test page at sizes as small as 12 points without a mistake and our Arial test page at 10 points without a mistake. Although these aren't particularly impressive results, it's also worth mention that the i2600 did a better job than most scanners on some other fonts that aren't part of our official tests.

Other Issues

The one important complaint I have with the i2600 is the same one I have with i2400, namely that there are too many options in the driver that aren't self explanatory. The example I gave for the i2400 holds true here too. There's an option for skipping blank pages, which will let you scan both one- and two-sided documents without having to change settings and without winding up with blank pages when you scan a one-sided original. However the option is called Blank Image, which I'd argue is unnecessarily obscure. A more straightforward name, like Skip Blank Pages, would be a big improvement.

Once you puzzle out the meanings however (or read through the help screens for each driver tab), you'll find enough options in the driver to let you do just about anything you need to. Factor these driver options in along with the speed, OCR accuracy, and included application programs, and the Kodak i2600 has a lot going for it. More than that, with a higher capacity ADF than the Canon DR-2580C (75 pages rather than 50), faster scanning to PDF image files, and nearly as fast scanning for searchable PDF files, the Kodak i2600 offers more than enough to make it the new Editors' Choice for heavy-duty scanning in a small office or workgroup.

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