Kodak Alaris ScanMate i1150WN Review: Compact and Fast Network Scanner

In our day-to-day jobs, we all struggles with documents, especially when it comes to storing important docs in digital format. Most of the companies either already moved towards digital or in progress, but the major challenge is managing those old docs in a manner that can be dug easily when required.

Kodak is working towards the solution, earlier we saw Kodak i1190E document scanner and now we got ScanMate i1150 scanner which is less expensive than i1190.

Compact and easy to setup

The compact in size scanner can easily fit on your table's corner. It can be easily setup with your PC or you can configure it on your existing network to share the device with other colleagues. The wireless document scanner capacitive buttons those help you to operate the machine easily without touching the PC. You can select scan type, start & stop scanning and one button to power on/off and a button arranged information. The scanner comes with a screen on the top displaying info like SSID and IP address. Don’t be confused about the IP address it shows, as its a network scanner thus it can be used by a group of people working on a shared network.

It offers both wired and wireless connectivity option, once you configure it on the network, it is ready to be used by your family members or office colleagues. One can also scan a document directly via using Wi-Fi direct by adding one app on the mobile device "ScanMate+", available on both iTunes App Store and Google Play store. You can connect the scanner to your network and use the wireless connectivity you can scan the document wirelessly. Also, it increases the flexibility, the scanner can be shifted anywhere, once setup is done, and you need to only power it on to begin the scans.

You can set about 9 self-configuring so-called SmartTouch profiles on the machine, however it comes with standard nine already created profiles. Kodak just making it convenient for users to customize the profiles as per their requirements.

Rich colors and sharp texts 

I setup the scanner on our lab's network to test its performance. It took approx 10 minutes to configure the device and setup my mobile device for wireless activities. The scanner tray can accommodate up to 75 pages of sizes varying from Folio (8.5 x 14”) 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.

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 scanner fulfilled expectations by scanning both sides of 25 A4 sized sheets in approximately 44 seconds; average time per page is thus 1.7 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.

Let's talk about the OCR function, it read the text without error as small as 6 points with Arial and 8 points with Times New Roman. Its performance was less consistent with some of the nonstandard fonts in our suite, but that's not unusual.

About the bundled software, it lets you edit scans easily and comes with options including straighten, add or remove the border, rotate, scanning of paper, brightness and contrast, color balance, sharpening, filter stripes, color removal and empty graphics erase.