Review: Kodak Scan Station 100

Take a top selling colour scanner, bolt on a PC and a touch-sensitive colour screen and you’ve effectively got a Kodak Scan Station 100. However, the real thing also has one or two extras that make it a lot more than a mere sum of those parts.

The first of those extras is the ability to swallow up to 1,000 pages a day; scan each side at a rate of 50 sides per minute; automatically de-skew the resultant images and – courtesy of Kodak’s Perfect Page image processing technology – give readable results with even the most, blurred, ragged and tatty of originals.

The Station 100 can decipher the content of documents being scanned and save the results in searchable pdf files as well as create the more usual Tiff and Jpeg images.

And last, but by no means least, it can email scanned files, send them over the network to a printer and save them to a network share or USB memory stick. All this is done from the touch-sensitive screen using an interface that can be customised to suit different users.

Designed as a standalone device, typically feeding data into a document management system, the Scan Station 100 was very easy to use and we were impressed with the quality of the results, even though some of the originals were poor. The interface is intuitive and the screen can be rotated to suit, a facility we found particularly handy when looking for somewhere to locate the hardware.

Unfortunately the scanner is sheet-fed only, which means you can’t scan in books or stapled documents without pulling them apart. However, it’s quick and there’s no need to align the pages before feeding them in. Plus there’s a special attachment to allow ID cards and other thick items to be scanned.

For the sake of security, Kodak has made the network interface operate in one direction only, with no remote setup or management facilities.

Instead, a separate Windows application is used to configure the software and the settings are saved to file on a USB memory stick. Just pop this into the Scan Station and it’s ready to use. The same approach is used to customise the interface for different users, each of whom can be given their own profile on a memory stick.

The result is a very robust, secure and easy-to-understand solution, which when located in remote offices and warehouses requires very little maintenance. On the negative side, it’s not possible to retrieve email addresses from a central directory or troubleshoot problems remotely.

A lack of facilities to email to groups could also be seen as a limitation and, unlike the much cheaper Samsung SCX-5530FN multifunction laser, you don’t get a built-in fax modem. However, an update is due for release shortly to enable scanned documents to be distributed via a network fax package. Enhancements to the naming scheme will also make it easier to recognise documents sent to network shares.

Overall we liked the Scan Station 100 which was very easy to use and gave consistently good results regardless of original quality. However, it’s far from cheap and, as such, something of a specialist buy best used as part of a wider document management solution rather than a general-purpose network scanner.

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