Although the Kodak i2400 ($845 direct) is a bit larger than typical scanners for individual use, and Kodak calls it a workgroup scanner, it's just as appropriate for an individual with heavy-duty scanning needs as for a small office or workgroup. It delivers the right set of features for all of these potential uses, with fast speed, duplex (two sided) scanning, and simple options for document management, editing documents, and sending scans by email. The combination is more than enough to make it an attractive choice.

The i2400 is a close match in many ways to the Editors' Choice Canon DR-2580C ($875 street, 4.5 stars). Not so incidentally, if you look at the DR-2580C review, you may notice that I reviewed it some years ago, in 2005. But don't discount it because of its age. Document scanners haven't changed much. The DR-2580C still holds up against the competition, and still fully qualifies as Editors' Choice. (It also comes with more software now than it did when I reviewed it.) The i2400 is a serious challenger, though, and depending on your needs, may even be the better fit.

Basics

Setting up the i2400 is standard fare. One unusual touch, however, is that the scanner comes in what Kodak calls its storage position, with the trays closed and the scanner itself in a vertical position. Before you can use it, you have to rotate the body so it's at an angle to the base instead of straight up and down, and then optionally pull out the trays. When you're not using it, however, you can return it to the storage position, with a footprint of only 13 inches wide by 6.3 inches deep. This little trick goes a long way towards making the scanner a comfortable fit for a desktop.

Note too that you can also add one of two flatbeds as a separate, companion scanner add-on. At this writing, the only choice is the letter-size version ($495 direct), but Kodak says that a tabloid-size (11- by 17- inch) version ($1,428 direct) will also be available, probably by the time this is published.

Kodak bundles a highly useful selection of software with the i2400, with capable programs for document management (Nuance PaperPort 12) and optical character recognition (Nuance OmniPage 17). In addition, the Twain, ISIS, and WIA drivers will, between them, let you scan directly from virtually any Windows program that includes a scan command.

Also included are two scan utilities, one that installs along with the drivers and one that installs from a separate disc. Unfortunately, this is more confusing than helpful, since it's not obvious why you might use one or the other. Worse, 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. Kodak says the guide is actually available online, and the company is planning to fix the misstatement on the disc sleeve.

For my purposes, I took a look at both utilities. For my official testing, however, I stayed with the one that installs with the drivers, since it's effectively the default choice. All of my comments here, and all of my results, are based on that default utility. Note that the best one to use really depends on which one you prefer using for your particular scan applications.

Performance

Kodak rates the i2400 at 30 pages per minute (ppm) and 60 images per minute (ipm) for duplex scanning, with one image on each side of the page, at the default 200 pixel per inch (ppi) resolution in black white mode. That's a bit faster than the DR-2580C's rating of 25 ppm and 50 ipm. In my tests, however, the i2400 turned out to be both faster and slower than the Canon scanner.

The Kodak scanner was faster for scanning to a PDF image file. For simplex scanning, I clocked it at 28.3 ppm, close to its rated speed. For duplex scanning, it came in at 53.6 ipm. That makes it a little faster than the Canon scanner, at 25.4 ppm for simplex scans and 49.1 ipm for duplex.

For scanning to a searchable PDF file, however, the Canon scanner has the advantage, because it doesn't slow down at all to recognize the text. For our 25-sheet (50 image) test document, the DR-2850C took just 1 minute 1 second. The i2400 took 1:34. Which one will be faster for your real world scans, in short, depends on the format you need to scan to.

That said, keep in mind that the i2400 isn't all that slow even with the text recognition step added, so don't take this particular speed comparison too seriously. The 40 ppm, 80 ipm Canon imageFormula DR-3010C ($800 street, 4 stars), for example, was only slightly faster than the i2400 for scanning and OCRing the file, at 1:28.

Finally for performance, the i2400 also did reasonably well in our OCR tests, reading both our Times New Roman and Arial test pages at 10-point size without a mistake.

Other Issues

The one complaint I have with the i2400 is that too many options in the driver aren't self explanatory. For example, I was looking for a way to scan in duplex, but have the scanner ignore blank pages, so I could scan both one-sided and two-sided documents without having to change settings. I had almost concluded there was no such option, when I saw a setting labeled Blank Image, with two choices under it. I took a guess that Based on Content might be what I was looking for, and I turned out to be right. But I'd argue that the terminology is unnecessarily obscure. A better name for the setting would be Ignore Blank Pages.

The good news is that once you puzzle out the meanings (or read through the help screens for each driver tab) you'll find a rich selection of scanning options. That counts as another plus to go along with the fast speed, OCR accuracy, and bundled application programs. The Canon DR-2850C still edges the i2400 out for Editors' Choice, mostly because it can recognize text without slowing down. However, the Kodak i2400 is a close second, and—particularly if you scan primarily to image format—it may even be your preferred scanner.

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