Kodak i3250 review

Kodak’s latest departmental rotary scanner throws down a big gauntlet. It supports A3 paper sizes, boasts a fast 50ppm A4 scan speed and looks good value against the competition. Like the A4-only i2900, it has a secondary A4 flatbed scanner built into the upper paper tray.

Kodak i3250: Features & design

Despite its support for larger sheets, the i3250 still retains the same footprint as the i2900, so it’s certainly small enough to sit easily on a desk. It stands only 2cm higher, but weighs 2kg more and promises a higher, 15,000-sheet daily scan duty cycle.

For fast scan operations, Kodak’s Smart Touch software supports up to nine profiles, which can be selected using the buttons on the front panel. Everyday scanning jobs thus become as simple as loading your document, choosing the appropriate profile from the backlit LCD panel and hitting the Start button.

Possible scan destinations include folders, applications, network printers, email addresses, SharePoint, Box and Evernote. However, Dropbox and Google Drive aren’t supported.

You also get a limited edition of Kodak’s Capture Desktop software, which provides batch scanning and document workflow management tools. These let you, for example, apply groups of image-processing settings to each page and add separation pages when barcodes are detected. Both this and Smart Touch can’t be open at the same time, however, since each requires exclusive access to the scanner.

Kodak i3250: Performance

In terms of performance, the scanner is right on the mark. After hitting the Scan button, the elevator took 3-4 seconds to adjust itself, then proceeded to rip through a 50-page sheaf of A4 bank statements in only a minute, scanning at both 200dpi and 300dpi resolutions.

Post-processing times will depend on the power of your PC. Our Core i3 host added ten seconds to the 300dpi test, while an A4 test using a 600dpi profile returned 11.5ppm with an extra 40 seconds of post-processing. A 200dpi duplex scan of 25 A3 pages averaged a speedy 30ppm.

As with the i2900, scan quality is fine for document management and archival purposes, with searchable PDFs produced very accurately. Paper handling is excellent, too: the 250-sheet motorised elevator provides a thick, plastic support arm for A3 paper, and turning a lever opens the rear exit, making it possible to scan documents up to 4.1m long in continuous mode.

In practice, the scanner took our mix of receipts, statements, flimsies and invoices in its stride and neatly applied anti-skew to each one. With multifeed detection set to medium, the scanner stopped immediately whenever it picked up more than one page. However, with the flatbed, although documents were reproduced well, glossy colour photo scans looked grainy and inferior to those from the feeder.

Kodak i3250: Verdict

Kodak’s i3250 packs a lot into its compact dimensions, with fast scan speeds, solid paper handling and good document scan quality. The A4 flatbed is the weak link, but you won’t find a better-featured A3 rotary scanner at this price.