Kodak i1190E Scanner Review: Towards (Almost) Paperless Workplaces

Filing and documentation of paper is something that all of us struggle with, in our offices or at home each day. Digging up relevant documents poses a greater challenge. With emerging technologies, businesses are steering towards a paperless workplace, and scanners are at the starting point towards this transfer, for conversion of paper into digital documents. With its new i1190E desktop scanner, Kodak is bidding to lead this shift towards a work environment that doesn’t rely on paper.

Compact and Versatile

Lightweight and compact, the Kodak i1190E scanner is a great tool for businesses of all scales as well as entrepreneurs, which increases their efficiency and productivity by clearing the clutter of paper, and reduces carbon footprint. The scanner tray can accommodate up to 75 pages of sizes varying from Folio (8.5 x 13”) with a maximum page length of 3 meters, to as small as 2 x 2.5” visiting or ID-cards, giving flexibility in documents sizes that it can process. It is noteworthy that a user can scan both single-sides and double sided documents. Kodak i1190E scanner also boasts of barcode reading capabilities.

Convenience at a Single Touch

The packaging houses a standard USB Type-A to Type-B cable, a 24V power adapter, documentation & setup manuals, and a CD with drivers and Kodak’s proprietary Capture Pro (Limited Version) software. The installation of drivers consumes as much time as 30 minutes to an hour. The power jack and USB port are present at the rear. The front has touch-enabled keys and LCD display to present no of documents scanned in the batch and selected mode out of nine presets. These presets, part of Kodak’s Smart Touch Technology, allow nine user-friendly tasks including creating JPEGs or PDFs, attaching the scanned and sending via mail, storing and organizing scans and even uploading them to the Cloud. Scans can be stored as BMP, PNG & JPEG, PDF, RTF (Rich Text Format), and TIFF (Tagged Image File Format – used mostly by photographers, graphics artists and publishers).

Touch panel and LCD display

Remarkable Quality – Rich Colours and Crisp Text

The optical resolution of the scanner is 600 dpi (dots per inch is a unit of optical resolution). One can toggle between output resolutions ranging from 100 dpi to 1200 dpi. With a scanning frequency of 40 pages per minute (at resolutions up to 300 dpi), the i1190E scanner fulfilled expectations by scanning both sides of 25 A4 sized sheets in approximately 39 seconds; average time per page is thus 1.5 seconds. For resolution higher than 300 dpi, the scanning time is considerably higher, exhausting up to 10 seconds per page.  The depth of output colour is commendable, images are sharp and text is clearly readable.

Limited Connectivity Options

The downsides include lack of Wifi or any other communication medium for scanning via mobile devices. Thus, a PC has to be always connected, even to keep the scanner powered on. Kodak, however, provides EMC Toolkit allowing developers to create their own browser-based applications, including those for barcode scanning.

Costly Affair

The Kodak i1190 scanner was launched with a price tag of $895, translating to roughly Rs. 59,800.