NEW YORK, N.Y., April 30 -- Eastman Kodak Company introduced today the first high-speed, color-optional scanners for the commercial market in a bid to take advantage of the ever-increasing need for productivity, lower cost of ownership and the worldwide growth of color document output and capture. Starting at a price of approximately $50,000, the i800 series of scanners from Kodak's Document Imaging division will begin shipping in the fourth quarter 2001. The four models of the i800 Series represent the first family of devices to be marketed as Kodak iNnovation Series Scanners. The series marks Kodak's strongest entrant to date in the nearly $300 million market for high-speed production scanners. "For the first time ever, these scanners allow high-volume capture sites-insurance companies, financial institutions, government agencies-to more quickly and accurately meet the demands of complex production schedules that involve color documents," said Mike Marsh, vice president, Document Imaging division and general manager of the Capture business group. "Combining our newest technology with Kodak's SurePath paper handling and Perfect Page Scanning leads to maximum uptime and outstanding image quality. The result is a more time- and cost-efficient scanning process." The performance of the i800 series of devices is enabled by the new Kodak TriColor Plus CCD sensor, which allows for high-speed, bitonal or simultaneous bitonal and color scanning for reduced pre-sorting functions. For instance, a document that includes both text and photos can be output as bitonal, color, or both in a single pass. This feature-found only on the i820 and i840 models-addresses the increasing convergence of color and images in business documents, while reducing the need for multiple scans to capture text and images separately. The i800 Series is also designed for companies that need bitonal capture today, but anticipate color usage in the future. The bitonal i810 and i830 can be color-enabled by Kodak field personnel within a matter of minutes. Kodak's Perfect Page technology, which integrates self-calibrated illumination, custom-designed optics, and a high-performance sensor array, results in the highest level of image quality. Perfect Page automatically runs in the background at full production speed, which reduces the need for operator involvement by eliminating pre- and post-scan quality control. To enable higher optical character recognition (OCR) read rates, the electronic color dropout feature lets operators remove irrelevant background color without stopping to change lamps. In addition, new Zone Processing allows user selection of a fixed subsection or zone from which to capture color information (e.g., the photo area on a passport application.)