Kodak ScanMate i940 Scanner - 1960988

My review of this scanner is this does a great job of scanning both sides of a page at once. Now lets break this down so I can give the strengths and weaknesses of this scanner: Weaknesses: 1) Default Scanner Software Settings - The scanner software is setup for 200 dpi by default which makes pages fly through the scanner but produce a not very good quality scan. You can change these settings to 300, 400, or 600 dpi for each scanning setting. 2) Using the supplied scanning software at resolutions above 200 dpi made the scanner vibrate (vibration were due tot he stepper motors being told to increment the page through the reader with a long pause between steps) using my computer system and was due likely to poorly caching the image (just a guess), and the pages scan much slower. It's not a deal breaker, it just made more noise than I wanted it to. 3) No place for the paper coming out to collect, meaning it spits it out off my desk. You need to figure a way to have the pages drop into some sort of bin/tray if you want to retain your pages in a nice neat stack. It doesn't distract from the quality of the device but as a home user, we are likely to require pages not on the floor. 4) Not a large input tray but it should be fine for home use. 5) Input paper tray could use taller paper guides to ensure the pages do not skew. Strengths: 1) Small, compact, and feels sturdy. 2) Turn power on when you open the top. 3) Comes with decent scanning software. 4) Scans both sides of a page rather quickly with good software (more on this below). 5) Comes with every imaginable power adapter (replaceable part on the wall-wort transformer). 6) Paper User's Guide is reasonably written. 7) Accepts thick paper/cardboard stock (I feed a birthday card though it without issue) 8) Kodak Capture Pro Software (Limited Edition) So lets hit up the main thing we should talk about, the software because that is what makes or breaks this little gem. The standard supplied software provides an icon in the icon tray and gives you several options for scanning but the default settings produce crappy results at 200 dpi so you should change this to at least 400 dpi for color, 300 dpi for B&W, plus there are other setting which you can change to adjust the quality of the scans. Once you have done this the scanner works very well, BUT to get the most out of this scanner you should have some better quality scanning software and I just happen to own Adobe Acrobat version 9 (not cheap software but I need it for my job). There are other very nice and some even free software packages out there (you may already have one you like and use). When you install the printer software (provided on a CD) a TWAIN driver will be loaded as well which your other software can take advantage of. When I use Acrobat to scan a stack of documents at a setting of Color Document 300 dpi, the pages fly through the scanner (maybe 1 page every 2 seconds, guess a guess, didn't actually time it) and the scanner ran very smoothly, no vibrations like the supplied software caused. Using Adobe Acrobat Pro to scan: Color Document at 300 and 600 dpi = no vibrations and fast scanning. Greyscale at 300, 600, 1200 dpi was smooth and quick. Now I don't want to put down the basic supplied scanning software, it's not bad at all however you must not use the default settings if you desire a good quality scan result. Also ensure you do not always use the color scan option if you are scanning a typical B&W bill/statement because you can scan using B&W at say 300 dpi and get great and very fast results using the supplied software, it only really falls off when you select the color mode of scanning. Capture Pro Software Suite Limited Edition: This is a great bonus because this software, while not like Acrobat Pro, does do some pretty nice things. Let me hit you with what I couldn't get it to do which was de-skewing the scans. This was not an issue for me but could be for someone else who wants perfectly aligned vertical scans. The great things are it allows you to batch scan your documents, meaning you feed a stack of documents into the scanner and a grid of document images appears. You can select one or multiple images and then save those in many different formats (I like searchable PDF) and you save your selected pages, then remove them and then select other pages you scanned and save those. It actually makes scanning documents faster because you can scan a large amount and then just work on saving them. Also, the vibration is the same as if I were using the Acrobat resolutions so it works nice. I will have to use this some more to see if I would become more productive using this application over Acrobat (my favorite to date but I could change). Paper Skewing: While the paper was in the input paper tray and being pulled into the machine, periodically the pages would skew slightly to the top left. Using Acrobat this is not an issue at all as it will automatically de-skew your scanned pages h...

Couple of minor quirks here and there but most of the issues mentioned in the negative or neutral reviews with regards to the software have been addressed as of July 2014. In fact, as of the version I'm currently using (1.7.111), I would say the software is actually one of the best features of this device, and Kodak seems to be updating it constantly. First off, the way you use this device is to press the arrow button to select the preset on the device itself, then press the green scan button to scan. You can have up to 9 presets and disable the ones you're not using, so you don't have to flip past them using the arrow button. The resolution you choose in the settings shortcut will determine how fast it scans. It technically does up to 1200 dpi, however, I've found that there's no image quality benefit beyond 600 dpi, and it can actually crash doing OCR (optical character recognition) at 1200 dpi on occasion. The settings are a little convoluted, but one of my main beefs with the software was addressed recently, which is that you couldn't have more than three settings shortcuts. The settings shortcut is the option within each "Task shortcut 'preset'" that has to do with how the image is acquired. You could not previously, for example, have more than three different combinations of resolution/number of sides/compression/document type previously. Now you can have as many as you want. Overall I just don't see how you can complain about this device. It does exactly what I want it to do, and it's dirt cheap. Ergonomically, it does a good job considering it's a lightweight small form factor device. Regardless of what Kodak says, the document feeder can handle more than 20 pages and will scan all day long as long as you can feed it paper. Here are some of the presets I've used: 1) Grayscale OCR PDF's for scanning general documents (one and two sided, I have a preset for each) 2) Color OCR PDF's for scanning colored documents 3) Color BMP's for scanning photos 4) High resolution non-text PDF's, non-OCR, for scanning music - works very well with no distortion. The OCR works very well although it does seem to distort the image in the background a decent amount like older versions of Abode did. Probably a way to fix that I haven't bothered to explore. Can't complain when I don't have to pay Abode to get decent scanned OCR'd documents. If I had to take issue with one thing, it's that scanning color photos is mediocre. Flatbeds are a much better choice for photos. You can't use JPEG compression at all with photos on the i940 software or they will come out blurry and oversaturated. And you pretty much have to clean the glass any time you scan a photo because otherwise you'll get streaks. Also, this thing seems to be rigged by default to give you the absolute worst image quality it's capable of generating because the default scan resolution for basically all of the presets is way too low (like 200 dpi) and when you add standard JPEG compression on top it pretty much ruins any image you scan. I'm 100% sure they did this to advertise better scan times. You need to start at 300 dpi to get any kind of decent quality and then go up from there. If you just got this thing and the pictures look terrible, the answer is that YES, you must fiddle with the software to get better scan quality. Presto Bizcard is included - really don't know how it works but it's excellent. Load the business card in, click acquire business card. It automatically sends it over to outlook which for me is linked to my gmail account, so I'm done. It's impressive how accurate it is... it always seems to fill things into the correct fields. In summary, for the price, the Kodak i940 is an excellent scanner. I really can't see any reason to spend more money for the average home office. edit: After one year, I am removing one star because the software is getting harder to get a hold of and Kodak won't distribute it anymore. Also, they haven't updated it in a while. Hardware still works flawlessly after all these years, though.