I guess one advantage to being the leading SharePoint Capture software company is that you get to test lots of great devices. When I find one I like, I like love to talk about it. Also I don't like to bash bad products, so I'll usually only talk about the good stuff. My latest love is the Kodak Scan Station 100, which Kodak was nice enough to lend us for a while. I was skeptical as I had never really used a pure network scanner before, and therefore didn't have much to compare it against,

So, let's get on with what this thing does. It's basically a scanner with a built in computer that runs some version of Windows XP. I only know its XP because you can see the start screen when you turn it on. Being XP it takes a bit for it to boot up, but that's okay because you'll probably never turn it off, we don't anyway. The first thing you must do is only one of the two complaints I had and that was you have to install software on another machine to build (and later edit) the configuration. This could be a problem if you are constantly adding new users or locations, but from what I've seen it's typical of any device in this class, wait I've never really seen another device in this class. I setup about 10 email addresses for all the folks that sat close enough to the device for it to be handy and then I setup a couple UNC paths to simulate scanning to a couple different types of documents (more on this later). The configuration program also allows you to setup default for just about anything else you want such as document format (PDF, TIFF, JPG), simplex/duplex, OCR and a host of other settings.

Once you have the configuration complete you simply save it onto a USB drive, bring the USB drive to the Scan Station and as soon as you plug it in, you are asked to overwrite the existing configuration. The only two things I could think to improve on here would be to plug a keyboard into the USB port and let you configure directly on the Scan Station or have the ability to save the configuration across the network since its obviously network aware.

Okay the hard parts done, time to sit back and have fun. Once setup I just simply dropped paper into the ADF, selected my location(s), which were Emails are UNC paths and press the green button. Here is my second and last gripe, and it's because the lamps take about X second to warm up, and I want to scan now. Really not a big issue and I'm simply pointing it out. Once warmed up scanning is relatively fast at 28 pages per minute bitonal, but slows down dramatically when doing Image+Text PDF (because of the OCR). The files were either emailed or placed on the network immediately. Heading to my Inbox I checked out the files and I was blown away. Kodak Perfect Page works and works well… I guess I didn't mention that handy feature earlier. Perfect Page is a technology that cleans up your document automatically without the user having to press buttons and think about things. It performed deskew, black border removal, auto page size detection and some thresholding on every image I scanned, which gave me very good results. Good enough were OCR and barcode detection (via KnowledgeLake Capture Server) worked consistently. The only other image cleanup thing I would have like to have seen was blank page detection, but luckily combined with our software this is taken care of.

So why would someone want to buy this device? I would say the perfect scenario is for small departments that don't either want to spend the money on a quality scanner for each desktop or just plain don't have the room. If these departments have an imaging repository capable of inputting from network locations or simply want images sent to their Inbox, this device will meet their needs and unlike some other review of this scanner, I think the price is great at $2599.

How did I test this device? I connected it via Ethernet to a 100 Mbps switch on our company network. I scanned to both Email addresses and network locations. I used KnowledgeLake Capture Server to pick up the images sent to network locations, and sent them through our image processing modules to split into multiple documents when a barcode was detected. Next Capture Server placed them in a web indexing queue where they were manually indexed and then sent to SharePoint. I tested both multi and single page TIFF files as well as Image+Text PDF files.

My final thoughts on this product are simple; I recommend it for the scenario mentioned above. This device will also soon be certified for use KnowledgeLake Capture Server.

Enjoy, Chris