Buyers Laboratory LLC, the world’s leading independent tester of document imaging products, announced today that Eastman Kodak Company has won the BLI 2012 “Scanner Line of the Year” award for its outstanding scanner product line. For the 2011 test year, BLI tested the 30-ppm Kodak i2400 in the workgroup category, the 60-ppm i2800 in the departmental category and the 170-ppm i5600 and 210-ppm i5800 in the high-volume production category. All four devices earned BLI’s Highly Recommended rating and won BLI “Picks” in their respective groups.

“These scanners achieved more ‘firsts’ than most other scanners tested have,” said BLI Senior Test Technician Joe Ellerman. “With the launch of its i2000 series and i5000 series scanners, Kodak has shown its commitment to creating reliable, easy to use products at an affordable price.”

In addition to their user-friendly design, the i2400 and i2800 offer customers a three-year limited warranty, instead of the typical one-year warranty package available with competitive scanners. And through Kodak’s Scan Validation Tool, users can customize the sensitivity level of the color detection settings so that the scanned image will be saved as a color document only if a specified amount of color is present, which helps to reduce file sizes. During BLI’s lab tests, both units exhibited flawless reliability; excellent media handling, including the ability to scan embossed cards, carbonless forms and long documents up to 160"; and excellent workflow automation thanks to their software bundles consisting of BLI-award winning Nuance PaperPort and Nuance OmniPage, among others. The i2800 also surpassed the average scan speed of A4 units in its class.

“This honor reflects our tireless work with customers, resellers and industry partners to develop innovative, easy-to-use scanner platforms,” said Budd Webster, Kodak Document Imaging’s director of business and category management. “Leading edge technologies from Kodak—in workgroup, departmental and production scanning solutions—enable numerous organizations to transform and streamline their document intensive business processes.”

Like Kodak’s workgroup and departmental offerings, the i5600 and i5800 also offer many unique features for the production segment that are sure to be benchmarks for future testing. The i5000 series has been designed to ease the scanning experience by including a tiltable control panel and the ability to remove misfeeds with the touch of a button. A virtually unlimited number of customizable scan profiles can be created for frequently used operations. Users can also program custom alert sounds for different error conditions and set scan, maintenance and user counters. Plus, its advanced media-handling capabilities allow the ADF to handle rice paper, checks, carbonless forms and even documents up to 180". The i5800 also allows scan operators to adjust the height of the base from 41" to 51.5" to allow for easier scanning.

“When looking at the product line, it’s easy to see that Kodak knows its customer base,” said Lisa Reider, BLI’s senior product editor for scanners. “The design, the functionality and the price point all seem to be chosen with care and precision. That’s one of the main things we look for when evaluating a scanner. Sure speeds and feeds can be important, but they’re all for naught without the usability factor.”

Most Kodak scanners, including all four “Pick” winners, also offer multiple consumable bundles designed to fit a variety of budgets. And while some competitive consumable kits include an uneven number of replacement parts (for example: two ADF pads with a yield of 20,000 scans and one roller with a yield of 100,000 scans, requiring customers to purchase a new kit every 40,000 scans), Kodak has made sure that every consumable in their kits is used up before the customer needs to purchase another one. This helps to reduce waste and the total cost of the product—providing another example of how Kodak customers come first.

In addition to the four scanners that helped Kodak earn this year’s “Scanner Line of the Year” award, the company offers over 20 different scanners ranging in speed from 20 ppm to 210 ppm, which includes simplex devices, duplex devices, network-connected devices and several workgroup, departmental and production devices designed to fit nearly any scanning environment. Kodak also offers A3- and A4-size flatbed accessories designed to fit many of the workgroup and departmental product offerings. Plus, Kodak’s BLI-award-winning capture solution—Kodak Capture Pro—offers all of the most commonly used features desired in a capture solution, including indexing, barcode recognition, automatic image processing and drag-and-drop OCR.

Stay tuned for upcoming Buyers Lab “Pick” award announcements in the following categories:

January 11: A4 Picks and A4 Line
January 12: Solutions Picks
January 13: A3 Picks
January 17: Solutions Line and A3 Line