( 7 reviews )
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( 2 of 2 found this review helpful ) Posted: Feb 2 2008
We've been using ours for about 14 months. The engineers who developed this unit did a beautiful and daring job to come up with a new product category. What's great about the scanner as directly networkable ethernet appliance is that it fundamentally changes workflows, and makes scanning available to everyone around. We bought this 50% because it was network attached, 50% because it has a great sheet feeder. Kodak came through with significant software upgrade last summer that supports (somewhat awkward, but okay) file naming directly at time of scan - through the unit's touch screen. This is a huge help. The Scan Station software takes some getting used to, but is very well through out and can be configured for operation by people who really can't deal with technology. A relatively geeky person doing set up (and taking a day or two) can make life really smooth and easy for his or her non-geeky colleagues. The difference between the 5 stars and 3 stars is simple: The CPU and RAM are not adequate and not upgradable. As you probably understand already if you are reading this review, the scanstation a scanner wrapped around a Windows workstation, disguised as something almost as simple as fax (or a toaster for that mater. Despite the value of the integration of the scanner into an applicance (the success in "hiding" the technology behind a simple user story) it is impossible to get away from the fact that the CPU power really does matter and the Scan Station 100's processor isn't good enough . We are talking about a Celeron D (2.4 GHz) - something that would have been in a Walmart $500 home office computer from 2003, 2004. Weak when it was new years ago, an 1/100th the speed it could be. RAM upgradableness would also be very great (2GB is what we would do. Although it's not the only technical option - the key to this scanner is that it make it easy for a whole of office of people who don't really understand what a "searchable pdf" document is to product them anyway. But OCR and creating a searchable PDF take time. The result is that if you have more than 50 pages (25 sheets) you're in trouble. And you must wait for the OCR to complete before adding more paper. Even great equipment can mean change - and change means resistance. We can't put every manager under a command to scan or walk the plank - so going paperless requires cheerleading and internal marketing. It is the "appliance" nature of the Scan Station 100 that's great. It would be *much* *much* easier to sell coworkers taking the trouble to scan documents if the Scan Station 100 did not have an obviously obsolete and we could spend some extra money on extra RAM. The basic engineering and and concept is beautiful. Did I mention that the feeder is great? (Basically the feeder doesn't jam, and can take checks, previously stapled 20 page contracts (staples removed), brochures, most things that look at all reasonable to get through a feeder. Put them in the feeder and it just scans them right in. Great... but then you wait. The scan station is priced as a luxury experience, and it almost delivers-- if it weren't for all those pesky pixels and processing time. Despite what the Kodak engineers may have hoped, we are in a rush, and the processing unit in the scanner is what keeps our users from wanting to hug it in gratitude. - Almost in love (did I mention it that it could be faster?) *PS: If we have something huge we scan .tiff images directly to the file server and then do the OCR and Acrobat conversion on a separate system. not something our typical user can really deal with, however. And it's techy enough to defeat the concept of a democratic, simple, accessible "appliance" style piece of hardware (which is what you are paying for).
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Posted: Dec 12 2007
My company bought two of these for light (a few pages every couple of days) to moderate (few pages a day, with occasional big jobs) scanning duties. One of them has worked fine. The other we have had to replace twice. Luckily we have been under warranty both times. The first one would turn on, but the screen never loaded to the menu. The second one made one load popping noise, after having been used sparingly for only a couple months, and wouldn't turn on again. Hopefully the third time will be the charm, but I'm not too optimistic.
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Posted: Nov 4 2007
I have had this product for about a month now and am still completely satisfied with it. It scans great, and I love that it scans both sides at once. Although undocumented, you can FTP the file to a mac. That's nice since I only use macs with it. I have had issues with the enclosed USB thumb-drives. My computer says they are drawing too much power and then the USB port shuts off. This doesn't bother me because I use my own, larger, USB drives anyway. You have to use a Windows PC to save configuration files to the USB drive if you want to do anything other than saving to the USB drive (like email, FTP).
