The Alaris S2070 Scanner by Kodak Alaris ($1,195) is a mid- to high-volume desktop sheet-feed document scanner. It's fast and accurate, and it comes with a highly capable software bundle for not only scanning to popular file formats, but also for converting your scans to editable text and archiving them for easy indexing and retrieval. In many ways, the Alaris S2070 is just as capable (and in some ways slicker) than the Visioneer Patriot H60, our current top choice for moderate-to-high-volume document scanners for small and medium-size offices and workgroups. But the S2070's higher price, lower scan volume, and slower speed capabilities render it just short of top marks.
Well-Designed and Attractive
The Alaris S2070 ($730.00 at Amazon) comes in a sleekly designed white chassis with a dark gray face. It measures 9.1 by 12.3 by 10.6 inches (HWD) and weighs 7.2 pounds with its trays closed, making it about average in dimensions and girth—say a pound or an inch or two, this way or that—than most of its direct competitors, including the Visioneer H60 and the HP ScanJet Enterprise Flow 7000 c3 Sheet-Feed Scanner, as well as the H60's larger, higher-volume sibling, the Patriot H80. In addition, the Alaris S2070 comes with an 80-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF), which is somewhat small compared with several of its like-priced competitors.
The Alaris S2070 supports up to 12 resolution settings between 75dpi and 1,200dpi, and, out-of-the-box, it comes with six workflow profiles, such as scan to searchable PDF and scan to black and white PDF, and you can edit them to fit your own workflow scenarios. The profiles can be initiated from the Windows system tray or from the scanner's control panel, which includes a small screen for displaying the active profile name, as well as four buttons: Up and Down (for scrolling through profiles), Start (scan), and Cancel.
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Software and Accessories
The Alaris S2070's software bundle consists of a set of drivers and Alaris' Info Input Express, which is a web-based scanning interface, document-indexing, and archiving program much different from most scanning software I've seen before, and that includes the software bundles that come with previous Kodak Alaris scanners, such as the Alaris i1190 Scanner ( at Amazon) .
Like other combination scanning/document-management software, Info Input Express allows you to set the conditions of your profiles, such as resolution, destination, and file type (say, for example, image or searchable PDF). It differs from some competing programs, though, in that it lets you define indexing parameters, such as keywords, as well as set up database indexing fields, prior to scanning. At first, it seems somewhat complicated, but after spending a little time with the documentation, it becomes apparent that Info Input Express can help you to create somewhat sophisticated search and retrieval database catalogs from your scanned documents.
To help you integrate the Alaris S2070 into specific types of enterprises, such as, say, hotels, hospitals, and other settings that may need to scan off-size or delicate documents, Alaris offers a few useful add-ons. For scanning passports and other small or fragile documents, for instance, the company offers its Alaris Passport Utility ($495), and for oversize media (up to 12 by 18 inches), there's the company's A3-Size Flatbed Accessory ($1,400). Both should make capturing data from fragile, off-size media easier, without damaging the originals or your scanner.
Excellent Capture Time
Alaris rates the S2070 at 70 pages per minute (ppm) for one-sided pages and 140 images per minute (or ipm, where each side of a page consists of one image). Without the lag-time—the time between when the scanner dumps the last page in the stack on to the output tray and the scanning software finishes saving the scan to a useable file format—the S2070 scanned our one-sided 25-page text document at the rate of 73.2ppm, and it scanned our two-sided 25-page (50 images) document at an average rate of 145ipm, or just faster than its one- and two-sided ratings.
When I set the software to scan and save to image PDF, the Alaris S2070 and its software scanned and saved our one-sided text pages at the rate of 63.5ppm, and it scanned and processed our two-sided pages at a highly respectable 117.8ipm. By comparison, Visioneer's Patriot H60 scanned and saved the same 25 pages at just 3ppm faster and our two-sided pages at just more than 2ipm faster, which, considering the H60's significantly higher speed ratings, is impressive for the less-expensive Alaris S2070.
The HP ScanJet 7000, at 3.5ppm and 6.8ipm slower than the S2070, performed well here, too, but the higher-priced, higher-volume Visioneer Patriot H80 ($1,299.99 at Amazon) , at 81.1ppm and 162.2ipm, turned in the most impressive scores on this portion of our tests. The most useful scans, though, are those saved to a format easily searched and indexed, such as searchable PDF. The Alaris S2070 scanned and saved our two-sided 25-sheet (50 pages) document to searchable PDF in 37 seconds. That's only 9 seconds behind the Visioneer H60, 10 seconds behind the Visioneer H80, and 17 seconds faster than the HP ScanJet 7000.
Accurate Text Conversion
While in many applications, fast scanning is important, in just as many (or perhaps more) scenarios, scanning accuracy is just as critical. If you've ever had to make a bunch of corrections to inaccurately scanned documents, then you understand how time-consuming that can be. To test accuracy, we scan several pages consisting of the same font at several different sizes, and then run them through the OCR solution that comes with the scanner, in this case, Info Input Express.
When scanning and converting our Arial font page to editable text, the Alaris S2070 delivered accurate, error-free text down to 6 points, as it did with our Times New Roman text page. This level of accuracy is not uncommon among relatively high-volume scanners like this one, though. All the machines we've discussed throughout this review also performed this well, which places the Alaris S2070 among some venerated competitors.
Fast, With Robust Software
The Alaris S2070 Scanner by Kodak Alaris desktop document scanner is fast and accurate, and its new Info Input Express software takes document management and indexing a step or two beyond what's available out of the box with most of today's desktop document scanners. The Alaris S2070 skated through our series of tests with ease, but not quite as quickly as the Visioneer Patriot H60. Not only is the H60 rated for higher speeds and volume, but it performs a little better and costs less—just enough to keep it from dislodging the Patriot H60 as our top choice for moderate to heavy-duty scanning in a small-to-medium size office or workgroup. Otherwise, the Alaris S2070 is an excellent alternative solution for relatively high-volume scanning.
The Alaris S2070 Scanner by Kodak Alaris is reasonably fast and highly accurate, if not a bit expensive compared with like-priced competitors.
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Former Contributing Editor
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