i200 brings production scanning to desktop

Kodak has brought the high quality of production-level scanning to desktop users with the release of its i200 series of scanners.

The devices were modified by the Commercial Imaging Group of Eastman Kodak from designs for its high-end scanners for professional users.

The i200 series is the first family of devices to offer a dockable flatbed and plug and play IEEE-1394 FireWire connections for wireless networking in small or home offices.

The company claimed that the new scanners could capture colour images at the same speed as bitonal paper documents.

Image processing software bundled with the hardware, called Perfect Page, incorporates the ability to perform high-level scanning functions such as autocrop, deskew, despeckling and adaptive threshold processing.

Two versions are shipping: a simplex i250 model and a duplex i260 model. Both models are configured as shet-feed only as standard, but can be converted to accept flatbed-fed sheets by connecting the A3 dockable flatbed. Other features translated from higher-end Kodak scanners include: the TriColor Plus CCD Sensor for simultaneous output of colour and black and white; electronic colour drop-out; and 3D multi-feed detection with ultrasonic technology.

”The i200 Series scanners are packed with advanced technology. This product should have a similar positive impact on the low-volume market as the Kodak Digital Science scanner 3000 Series had on the mid-volume scanning market,” said Eric Hesnard. a director at the French office of reseller Dicom.

Kodak said the i200 Series Scanners were designed to handle more than 5,000 pages per day, and up to 50 pages per minute or 100 images per minute at 200dpi in colour, grayscale or bitonal.

The fourth quarter of 2002 will also see Kodak release a full version of Kodak Capture Software. Kodak said this will be a high performance plug and play application with an array of indexing and batching features. The application will, according to Kodak, be able to be used with most popular document and imaging management systems.