Kodak Alaris bags Buyers Lab’s Scanner Line of the Year Award

Kodak Alaris’ Information Management division has received four prestigious awards from Buyers Laboratory LLC (BLI), a provider of independent test-based analytical information and competitive intelligence for the global digital imaging industry. The company earned the 2017 Scanner Line of the Year award for the superior performance of its broad portfolio of products, for the second consecutive year. This premier award recognizes the manufacturer whose line of devices is complete enough to meet varied customer needs and whose current portfolio has fared best overall in BLI’s rigorous lab-based evaluations.

According to BLI, the breadth of Kodak Alaris’ scanner portfolio is indisputable and the models tested turned in impressive results when evaluated for specific attributes, such as reliability, image quality, optical character recognition (OCR) accuracy and productivity. “Kodak Alaris scanners typically earn a rating of ‘Excellent’ on our rigorous reliability tests, which means they exhibit few if any misfeeds when we run the machine to its maximum rated daily volume,” US Lab Manager Joe Ellerman noted.

The EasySetup feature from Kodak Alaris received an Outstanding Achievement in Innovation award, which acknowledges products or capabilities that stand out for attributes such as innovation, usefulness, energy efficiency or value, and both the Kodak i5650 Scanner and Kodak Info Input Solution 4.0, won Winter 2017 Pick awards.

“Kodak Alaris holds the most Pick awards out of any scanner manufacturer tested by BLI and winning the Scanner Line of the Year two years in a row is a significant achievement,” said Siddhartha Bhattacharya, vice president of global marketing for Kodak Alaris’ Information Management division. “These awards validate our commitment to providing an unmatched portfolio of information management solutions that enable customers to achieve digital transformation. The combination of our science, technology and partnerships acts as a force multiplier and provides the ecosystem required for companies large and small to use data to drive business efficiency, profitability, and growth.”

BLI analysts selected the i5650 Scanner as the Outstanding High-Volume Production Scanner in the Winter 2017 Pick awards. BLI cited its flawless reliability and excellent performance during extensive lab testing. According to BLI, the i5650 Scanner also offers:

· Lower cost per scan and total cost of ownership (TCyoO) than others in its class

· Excellent workflow automation capabilities

· Versatile, high capacity automatic document feeder (ADF) and optional flatbed accessories.

Ellerman said, “The i5650 Scanner from Kodak Alaris delivered an impressive showing during BLI’s battery of tests. On top of its flawless performance during BLI’s 125,000 impression reliability test, it also proved to be among the fastest scanning devices BLI has tested to date.”

Kodak Alaris’ web-based and mobile capture application Info Input Solution 4.0, was named Outstanding Document Capture Solution in the Winter 2017 Pick awards. The browser-based “thin-client” applet allows users to capture documents at the point of origin (without requiring a full capture/processing application on each desktop), eliminating the need and cost to courier documents to a central scanning location. According to Jamie Bsales, Director, Office Workflow Solutions Analysis at BLI, “Info Input Solution is an impressive document capture solution that should have organizations rethink how and where they capture documents.”

The final accolade was for the EasySetup feature from Kodak Alaris, which received a Winter 2017 Outstanding Achievement in Innovation award. Configuring scanners can be a time-consuming task for IT professionals, especially when there are multiple devices that need to be set up. End users sometimes change device settings, which can impede productivity for subsequent users.

The EasySetup feature, which debuted on the i1190WN and i1150WN models, alleviates these hassles with a first-of-its-kind automated configuration process. The technician tasked with deploying the scanners simply enters the desired settings information on Kodak Alaris’ online EasySetup portal, prints the resulting configuration page, and scans it on the target device to automatically enter the settings. BLI said the EasySetup feature, is unique among scanners it has evaluated thus far. “We were impressed with the versatile configuration options offered by the EasySetup feature to fit into any network infrastructure, be it wireless, wired, or a combination of both,” Ellerman noted. Commenting on the win, Bsales added, “It greatly reduces the time it takes to configure new scanners and can be used to quickly and easily ensure that all compatible scanners in a fleet are configured with the desired settings.”

BLI’s awards are unique in that they are based on a rigorous battery of lab tests. Evaluations include extensive durability tests where each unit is run at the manufacturer’s maximum duty cycle. A BLI award is a hard earned distinction that buyers and IT directors can trust to better guide them in their purchasing decisions.