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Kodak's own SmartTouch software is a clever way of pre-defining a common set of scan jobs. There are nine pre-defined job types already set up, things like low resolution black and white scan, medium resolution scan for OCR and high resolution (600dpi) full-colour scan.

Each of these job types can be configured for your own needs, so you can specify single-sided or duplex scans, set the resolution or define a folder for the output. You then just set the job number on the scanner's display and hit the scan button: very quick and easy.

Kodak claims 20ppm for this scanner at 200dpi, a resolution suitable for archival as PDF files. Under test we bettered this, completing our 20-page scan bundle in 57 seconds. This is only half the story, though, as the pages are scanned to a buffer while being converted to PDFs, which takes a further 1:44 - still reasonably quick.

We scanned the same bundle at 300dpi, so we could OCR them, and this took 1:56 to scan, with the PDF documents ready for recognition after 3:30. Recognition times depend on the complexity of the page layout and usually involve dealing with recognition queries by inspection, so we quote times just for scanning.

We suffered a number of multi-sheet mis-feeds during testing and had to manually separate the offending sheets and rescan. There's no ultrasonic multi-feed detection on the ScanMate i1120, so the only way you can easily detect problems is by checking the number of sheets scanned is the same as the number you fed in.

Scan quality is generally good and even at 200dpi the results, which are auto-straightened and can be auto-enhanced, are very readable, sometimes more so than the originals if there's, for example, background spatter on a received fax page. With OCR, it's best to go through a two-stage process, scanning the documents in as a 300dpi PDF file in Paperport and then dragging the document to Omnipage for recognition.

Verdict

Despite some rather odd design decisions, like the orientation of page backs and fronts and the sharp turn pages are forced to make when fed to the output tray, the ScanMate i1120 does a good job with most scan jobs. It suits a moderate duty cycle, for archival to PDF documents or for OCR to live, editable pages. It's not quite as slick as its more expensive competitors, but then it's not as expensive as them, either.

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