Kodak i50

That said, professional OCR is a very different world, and an expensive one too. Kodak's next machine of this type in the range costs around five or six times as much as the i50. At the other end of the scale, you have people trying to conduct medium volumes of document scanning using ordinary office flatbeds and painfully slow ADFs, which rarely meet the quoted speeds. Now that OCR has reached its current level of reliability, people are becoming increasingly more interested in the digitisation of office documents for computerised storage. This desire is further fuelled by the big demand at the moment for recapturing out-of-print publications or company manuals and other documents whose original files have been lost.

Assuming a scenario in which a company or department regularly needs to scan more than 100 pages every day, they'll baulk at the high cost of professional solutions and wince at the labour-intensive hassle of the cheap alternative. Kodak offers the i50 as a means to bridge the gap. While it's certainly expensive compared to other A4 scanners with ADFs fitted, it's far better suited to mid-range volume OCR work where performance really matters.

Author: Alistair Dabbs