The Kodak ScanMate i1150 ($495) is aimed at scenarios like the front desk in a medical office that needs to scan documents from incoming patients into special-purpose software throughout the day. Indeed, there are some touches that will be particularly welcome for those kinds of vertical markets. A small, raised ledge on the front of the scanner, for example, will let you prop up an ID card for easy readability. In most ways, however, the i1150 is simply a highly capable desktop scanner that can fit well in most offices.

One key difference between the i1150 and scanners aimed at more general office use, like the Editors' Choice Canon imageFormula DR-C125, is that the i1150 doesn't come with any application programs. Looking strictly at hardware, the Kodak and Canon models deliver almost the same speed and capability. But with the Canon DR-C125 you also get programs for document management, optical character recognition (OCR), and business-card management, plus a PDF utility. The i1150 includes OCR capability in its scan utility, which will let you scan to searchable PDF format and editable text, but it doesn't include any standalone applications.

The presumption with the i1150 is that you'll be using it with software—most likely a vertical market package—that you already have. It comes with two Kodak scan utilities: Twain, WIA, and ISIS drivers; and EMC Captiva Cloud Capture, which is a developer's toolkit for creating connectors to let you send scanned images to cloud-based applications. As of this writing, Kodak Alaris expects to have equivalent for the Mac available for downloading shortly, with Linux drivers available for downloading soon after.

The drivers will let you scan from virtually any Windows program with a scan command, so if you're looking for a scanner for more general-purpose use, there's no reason you can't consider the i1150. Unless you already have the programs you need, however, you'll have to buy them separately.

Basics and Scanning

The i1150 offers a 50-page automatic document feeder (ADF) and a 600-pixel per inch (ppi) optical resolution. If you also need a flatbed, Kodak Alaris offers two options—one legal size ($495) and one tabloid size ($1,400). According to the company, you can plug either one into a second USB port on your PC and control it through the i1150's front panel.

Setup is standard. As with most of Kodak Alaris's other models, including the Kodak i2800 and the Kodak i2600, the i1150 lets you define a set of profiles with descriptive names. You can then scroll through them on the scanner's front-panel LCD, find the one you want, and hit the scan button on the front panel.

Unfortunately, the Kodak utility limits you to only nine profiles. On scanners that identify the profiles with numbers, that's a reasonable limit. With a descriptive name for each profile, however, it would be easy to work with more than nine, and the utility would be even more useful if it let you define as many as you like.

Performance

For scanning at both 200ppi and 300ppi, Kodak Alaris rates the i1150 at 25 pages per minute (ppm) and 50 images per minute (ipm), with one image on each side of a page. A particularly nice touch is what Kodak Alaris calls transaction mode, which translates to scanning the first 10 pages at 40ppm. The difference is significant enough so it's hard to miss the sudden change in speed when you get to the eleventh page. However, you shouldn't expect a 40ppm throughput even when scanning fewer than 11 pages.

See How We Test Scanners

In my tests using our standard 25-sheet test document and the default 200ppi resolution in black and white mode, the i1150 came in at 25.4ppm in simplex (one-sided) mode and 49.2ipm in duplex (two-sided) mode for scanning to a black-and-white PDF image file. Scanning just 10 pages, it came in only a tad faster, at 26.1ppm and 52.2ipm.

Subtract the lag between giving the scan command and the point where the first page starts feeding, as well as the lag between scanning the last page and finishing writing the file to disk, and the speed for the 10-page scan itself is close to 40ppm. But the more practical way to look at it is that the extra speed for the first 10 pages almost exactly makes up for the lag, giving you a true 25ppm throughput for any scan with 10 or more pages. That said, however, the Canon DR-C125 came in at its rated speed of 25ppm and 50ipm on our tests without a faster speed for the first 10 pages.

Text Recognition and Other Strong Points
As with most scanners, the i1150 adds extra time for text recognition if you scan to searchable PDF format, which is the more useful format for document management applications. Scanning our 25-sheet, 50-page test document to image PDF format in duplex mode took 1 minute 1 second. Scanning it to searchable PDF format took 1:16. That's not as impressive as the Canon DR-125, which took 1 minute with or without text recognition. However, most scanners add far more extra time. The Kodak i2600, for example, took 39 seconds for scanning to image format, but 1:16 for scanning to searchable PDF format.

The i1150 also did well on text-recognition accuracy, reading our Times New Roman test page at sizes as small as 8 points and our Arial test page at sizes as small as 6 points without a mistake. It also handled stacks of paper with different size originals without problems in my tests.

The Kodak ScanMate i1150 is clearly a strong contender for its intended market of medical offices and the like. For general-purpose office use, be sure to check out the Editors' Choice Canon DR-125, which offers essentially the same scan speed for image files, faster speed for searchable PDF files, and an assortment of bundled application programs. If you already have the programs you need, however, the i1150 can also be a reasonable choice for general office scanning, with its 50-page ADF, fast speed, optional flatbeds, and both fast and accurate text recognition.