Kodak i50

OCR (optical character recognition) has long been the preserve of the high end or the toy of the occasional user. However, to really break into the office mainstream, OCR needed to be made more reliable and the scanning systems more productive while remaining affordable. It's fair to say OCR reliability has now been achieved, but it's only with Kodak's i50 that desktop hardware is arriving to make full use of it.

The i50 is a flatbed scanner designed for, but not entirely dedicated to, everyday OCR tasks. So while you'd normally feed individual sheets through the machine using the ADF (automatic document feeder), the machine can still be operated as a regular office flatbed with a lift-up lid and A4-sized reflective scanning area. So far, it probably doesn't sound terribly new or important; after all, there are plenty of cheap flatbed scanners from the likes of HP and Epson that can be upgraded with ADF units. However, Kodak's i50 is more than simply a flatbed with document scanning added as an extra feature.

A conventional ADF unit works like its equivalent on a photocopier: it grabs each sheet in turn from the tray and lays it onto the glass bed. The scanning head runs from top to bottom, the sheet is ejected by the mechanism and the next sheet loaded ready for another pass. If you've ever tried these ADFs out, you'll appreciate how slow this process can be. An alternative is to ditch the bed altogether, instead using a fixed scanning head and feed the sheets through it, rather like a fax machine or a PaperPort scanner. The problem here is that you've lost the ability to scan thick materials.

Kodak's i50 attempts to offer the best of both worlds. The ADF on top is an integrated unit, which feeds up to 75 sheets of ordinary copier paper face down through a fixed scanning head in rapid succession, depositing them in a catch tray on the left of the machine. When you want to scan a 3D object or perhaps a photo, you lift the lid (the ADF raises above it easily) and place it flat on the glass plate. The scanning head then passes across underneath to make the capture.

A quick look at the resolution and colour depth specification of the i50 suggests that this isn't a device intended for designers or DTP hobbyists. The i50 has a fairly low optical sampling rate of just 300ppi. It achieved half the resolution test score we'd normally attain with other £1,000 scanners, so is clearly supposed to be an OCR machine with added flexibility, rather than a general all-rounder. The flatbed, then, isn't really intended for photos and 3D objects at all, but for awkward or delicate originals that won't go through the feeder. Obvious examples are book and magazine pages, which you'd rather not tear out of their binding, but it also applies to wafer-thin papers such as credit card slips or fiddly items such as business cards.

In use, the i50 fulfils its promise nicely. It can pretty much achieve its quoted speed rating of 10 to 20ppm: the limiting factor is more likely to be your PC and OCR software, and whether or not the OCR process can be delayed or conducted in the background while scanning continues. To this end, Kodak has bundled three applications as standard in the box: ScanSoft's very useful PaperPort document management package, Xerox's well-known TextBridge Classic OCR package, and the obligatory, but in this instance wholly unnecessary, MGI PhotoSuite SE for image editing.

Additionally we tested the i50 with other TWAIN-compliant software, including ScanSoft's recently released OmniPage Pro 11 (see Reviews, p160), with which the machine works extremely well. The driver interface isn't the prettiest but it's quite straightforward - just select the original source (ADF or bed), colour mode and sampling rate, then go. You can preview the document before committing yourself, which isn't as daft as it sounds. While you must retrieve the previewed document from the output catch tray and refeed it for the real scan, this lets you adjust capture settings for a long, multiple-page job based on similar-looking documents. Kodak has also included ISIS drivers for compatibility with existing OCR solutions in case you already have them. Practically all professional OCR operations use hardware and dedicated software based on ISIS, so this makes a lot of sense.