Kodak ScanMate i940 Scanner - 1960988

If you are looking for a simple scanner to go through a stack of paperwork, this will do the trick. Real simple to use right out of the box - it took longer to unbox than to get the first scan done and saved. I went through a pile of bills, reciepts, etc., about 100 pages, in under an hour. I probably could have gone through more faster if I didn't have to unstaple so much. The power supply comes with an assortment of adapters, so this can be taken anywhere; though it's not as small or lite weight as purpose-built portables. Overall build quality seems to be rather solid. It's real easy to access the feed rollers and scanner lights, just open the service cover. The rollers even pop out readily to clean any lint/hair/etc. that could get wound in it. Other reviews have made mention of the manual not explaining the 9 different modes. To which I say, load the SmartTouch software that comes packaged with it. This software lets you adjust and modify the different modes, and it's help file is the manual (in PDF). This manual can be downloaded from Kodak website at http://graphics.kodak.com/DocImaging/US/en/Products/Document_Scanners/Desktop/SCANMATE_i940_Scanner/Support/User_Manuals/Smart_Touch_manual_v1_7/index.htm For the price, it's a great little scanner, perfect for the home office or small business. It's not meant for the large volume like the pricier models, but it's excellent for this price-point.

I bought two of these. One for my father’s house and one for mine. I’m returning both because the sheet feeder doesn’t work as advertised. It can only handle a stack of two or three photos without jamming. Far less than advertised. Even after following tech support instructions to move the switch to the left, the automatic batch feeding never worked properly. The software provided lacks features and stores your scanned photos in a very confusing file structure. I scanned about 100 pictures and stopped because I had to go searching for them because the software doesn’t fit into my workflow. I tried to remedy the software problem by using VueScan, but VueScan couldn’t see the scanner. I didn’t try SiverFast because I thought it would be a waste of time. Do yourself a favor, like I did, and buy the PlusTek ePhoto Z300. It works as advertised and it comes with SilverFast which works really well. It scans one pic at a time but it’s really fast. I haven’t done a timed trial, but I definitely scanned over 100 photos in an hour yesterday.

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 however the supplied software did not do a good job of that. So the hit (albeit a small hit) is really against the hardware for allowing the page to move in the first place and I feel that if the paper guides were a little taller or maybe if the paper tray tilted back just a little more to improve alignment, this problem would be a little more corrected. But lets be honest here, automatic document feeders always have the risk of grabbing a little more on one side of a page than the other side due to the pages being not perfectly aligned or a little thicker or whatever, and it happens to expensive automatic document feeders as well. This was an observation and I would not let it stop you from purchasing this device. Cleaning Access: The top opens easily and allows you to use a nice clean cotton cloth to clean the scanner areas. I do not know what products to use to clean the rollers but hopefully that will not be required anytime soon. Summary: Although I have not had this scanner much over 24 hours, I love it and it has replaced my Lexmark MFP which I only used for the scanner because the ink was so terribly expensive. I tried to put it though it's paces in the short time I've had it in order to give it a fair review. I wish I could compare it to say a $400 or $800 scanner but I don't have those kinds of resources. What I cannot review at this time is the longevity of this product but I'm not abusive so I hope it lasts at least 10+ years. For a home or even I'd think a small office scanner, I'd highly recommend this one. Please keep in mind that I paid $160 delivered to my door and I am a home user, and I never did test this using only USB power, I used the supplied wall-wort, and I use Windows 7SP1 (all updated as of this review). These are factors you should take into consideration when reading my review.

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.

My new computer runs Windows 8.1. My old flat-bed scanner was incompatible with this version, so I got this scanner as a replacement, and am very pleased with it. It's faster than my old scanner (plus it will capture both sides of a page in one pass). Some say to dump the included software, but that makes no sense to me. The software includes Smart Touch which has an icon near the clock on the task bar. Turn on the scanner, click on this icon and it lists the 9 functions that can be selected. The really neat thing about this application is that all 9 functions can be completely customized--name the function what you want, select the output document type, and have it put the scanned output where you want. Just select Configure in the list. One of the options is Black & White RTF. This is an OCR output that makes the document editable in any word processor. There is a MAC version available. In my opinion, Smart Touch is the crowning jewel of this package.

I owned quite a no of scanners starting from the Fujitsu Fi-4120c scanner, follow by the fi-5120c and after which I purchase a ScanSnap S300 follow by Canon P-215 and last but not least the Kodak Scanmate. I am quite disappointed by the canon P-215 and the Kodak Scanmate I940 for the image scanning quality as per compared to the Fujitsu S300. For both the Canon P-215 and Scanmate I940, when you scan, the color reproductions was not close to the original document color as per the Fujitsu S300. For both the Canon and Scanmate, for a half folded a4 size paper, after scanning the folded line can be seen on the image. If the paper was crumped before the scanning, it will also appear on the image. If there is a single horizontal or vertical line on the page, the line will appear to be not straight or the color is not bold at part of the line. After Scanning the image of a document is really bad as you can tell that there are part where the light from the scanner bounced off from the paper that create a non-consistence image. I have been trying to replace my Fujitsu S300 Scanner as they don't have the facilities to scan ID Cards but however both newer scanner that I have purchase have not preform as well as the Fujitsu S300 as well as the Fujitsu S1300i where my other collegues are using. I hope that fujitsu will come out with one that will allow the scanning of ID for the compact scanner.

Working as an IT Director for a medium company a request was made for a small scanner. After looking around we came upon this. For our needs this scanner has handled everything we could throw at it. Besides the typical 8.5 x 11 letter sized pages, we have also scanned 8.5 x 14 and (most impressively) carbon copies from an invoice printer with no problem. Granted I don't use it on a day to day basis but I haven't heard of anyone complain about paper jams. Not saying it hasn't happened but if it has the users fixed it before informing our department. Quality and speed of scan are dependent upon each other. The higher the quality the slower the scan. Which is not usual, typical of scanners we've seen. Unless you're scanning a very high resolution picture though the quality doesn't need to be high and the scan per page is rather quick. Very little of our scanning involves pictures, almost entirely Excel graphs/charts or invoices. Of course all of this can be configured to your specific needs. We found this very easy to use. To our department this was just as important as the scanning speed/quality. We could configure a profile, assigned a number on the device, for each department's or user's needs. Scanning to email, to a local hard drive, or (with some creative configuration) to a network location. Being able to teach this to new users or entire departments was quite simple. This simplifies their work flow, reduces time (theirs and ours), and minimizes the assistance they require. To be honest of the dozen we've set up not once has a user reached out to us beyond the initial training. And we know they're being used, we see the files created in the network folders. That's enough to make me tap dance. Scanning in PDF and JPEG have been the only ones we have used, can't comment on the other formats but those two have come out perfectly; no corrupt or damaged files. There are a few drawbacks. They can only be connected via USB. An ethernet port would be nice but we make do without. My biggest gripe is that profiles cannot be exported. With each new installation we must configure the device rather than importing a file with all configurations ready. But these drawbacks are relatively minor.

Nice looking, well built unit, but absolutely useless without ScanMate software, which won't work on my Win7 x64 PC. Scans are all skewed, which needs to be corrected by software. Kodak support appears to be nonexistent. I'm packing it up for a return now and ordering a Fujitsu. I bought this because it uses TWAIN drivers, but it must use ISIS drivers for full functionality and to use the included software, hence it's no more compatible with my existing software as the competing Fujitsu model which doesn't include TWAIN drivers.