Good imaging, bad design

About a year and a half ago, I purchased 12 Kodak i160's in my organization for scanning into our document imaging repository. I was impressed with the imaging quality and it completely blew away the old Ricoh scanners we had.

I had a number of problems when I first got them. Three of them actually did not work at all. They would power up, but never establish a connection with the PC. I sent those back and they had to send me replacements.

I also had problems with the Firewire interface. Without warning, the connection to the scanner would disappear. The only way to re-establish the connection was to unplug, then replug the firewire cable. Eventually, they released a firmware update that fixed that problem.

One of the design "features" of the scanner is the straight-through paper path. The scanner feeds pages from the bottom of the stack (face down) and sends them directly through the scanner (doesn't wrap around and send it back out the front). This design has caused problems in my experience. First of all, the pressure of all the pages in the hopper causes the scanner to multi-feed pages. The result is that you can only feed about 20-40 pages in the hopper.

The other problem with this design deals with the ergonomics. My scanner operators are having a hard time getting the scanner set up in a good position. Since they need access to the front and the rear of the scanner, they usually just turn it sideways on the desk. This causes the scanner to take a significant amount of space on the desk.

My last issue deals with the power cable. The scanner itself doesn't have an on/off switch. It is located on the power brick (one cable goes from the wall plug to the power brick and the power brick has a permanently installed cable that connects to the scanner). The plug that connects into the scanner is rather fragile and as of yesterday, three of them have been broken. The replacement part costs $295.00.