Fujitsu and Kodak Alaris Each Earn Two BLI Winter 2015 Pick Awards

January 12, 2015 – Hackensack (NJ) – Buyers Laboratory LLC, the world’s leading independent tester of document imaging products, announced its highly anticipated Winter 2015 Pick awards in the scanner category today, bestowing honors upon two scanners from Fujitsu and two scanners from Kodak Alaris. Announced twice a year, the Pick awards acknowledge the products that gave the best performances in BLI’s extensive suite of laboratory tests in the previous six months.

The Winter 2015 scanner Pick winners are:

Comprehensive Capture          

The 60-ppm (120 ppm) Fujitsu fi-7160 and its flatbed-equipped sister model, the fi-7260, both earned BLI Pick awards for the Winter 2015 test season for their excellent overall performance during BLI’s lab evaluation. In addition, both devices come bundled with PaperStream Capture software, which provides a host of features to help ease the capture process, such as automatic indexing via zonal OCR or barcode recognition, and batch monitoring capabilities. Users can also program up to 50 scan profiles and several hot keys through PaperStream Capture for frequently used operations.       

“High performance scanning is a competitive market that requires not only constant innovation, but also reliable, easy-to-use solutions that can be easily integrated into an end-to-end document capture environment,” said Scott Francis, senior vice president of marketing for Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Inc. “The fi-7160 and fi-7260 provide unmatched performance, and when combined with Fujitsu’s new advanced image processing and capture applications—PaperStream IP and PaperStream Capture—give customers the most powerful, efficient scanning solution for any office environment.”

Both devices also exhibited faster than average color and auto-color speeds at 300 dpi and maintained their speeds even when various automatic image processing features were enabled/disabled. In addition to PaperStream Capture, the units come with ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap, which lets users convert scanned documents into editable file formats, such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint, using built-in optical character recognition technology.

“For companies looking for a complete capture package without the need for dedicated IT staff, the fi-7160 and fi-7260 fit the bill,” said Lisa Reider, BLI’s senior product editor for scanners. “The hardware handles a variety of document types efficiently without misfeeding, while the software gives users the freedom to manipulate documents, convert files, index data and so much more.

Full-Featured Functionality          

BLI awarded the 25-ppm (50 ipm) KODAK ScanMate i1150 and 40-ppm (80 ipm) ScanMate i1180 with Winter 2015 Picks for their outstanding performance in their respective workgroup categories. Both units handle a wider than average range of paper weights, and allow users to adjust the multi-feed detection function to suit specific scanning needs. Built-in Perfect Page technology provides a variety of features not typically seen on competitive devices, such as auto sharpen, RGB adjustments, custom area selection, foreground boldness, streak filter, hole fill and more. Via the bundled Smart Touch utility, users can also customize up to nine scan profiles for frequently used operations that can be accessed from the unit’s color LED screen.     

“Great customer service is the number-one differentiator for any business, so document capture where transactions are taking place can’t create a bottleneck,” explained Tony Barbeau, Kodak Alaris’s products and solutions general manager and vice president, Document Imaging division. “The ScanMate i1150 and i1180 Scanners deliver a combination of productivity and reliability that allows users to stay focused on what’s most important—their customers, providing quiet, efficient scanning for transaction-based environments such as medical facilities, insurance offices, government agencies and financial institutions.”

Both units come equipped with KODAK Capture Pro Limited Edition, which provides a variety of advanced capture features, such as batch separation via barcodes, blank page or by page count; indexing via barcode, manual entry or drag-and-drop OCR functionality; and scanning to Microsoft SharePoint. The ScanMate i1150 and ScanMate i1180 can also scan to various cloud destinations out of box.

“The KODAK ScanMate i1150 and ScanMate i1180 include a lot of functionality at an affordable price,” said BLI’s Reider. “In addition to their robust media handling, excellent selection of image processing features and easy to use design, they both offer a lower than average total cost of ownership for similarly equipped models.”

About Buyers Laboratory LLC          

Buyers Laboratory LLC (BLI) is the world's leading independent provider of analytical information and services to the digital imaging and document management industry. For over 50 years, buyers have relied on BLI to help them differentiate products’ strengths and weaknesses and make the best purchasing decisions, while industry sales, marketing and product professionals have turned to BLI for insightful competitive intelligence and valued guidance on product development, competitive positioning and sales channel and marketing support. Using BLI’s web-based bliQ and Solutions Center services, 40,000 professionals worldwide create extensive side-by-side comparisons of hardware and software solutions for over 15,000 products globally, including comprehensive specifications and the performance results and ratings from BLI’s unparalleled Lab, Solutions and Environmental Test Reports, the result of months of hands-on evaluation in its US and UK labs. The services, also available via mobile devices, include a comprehensive library of BLI’s test reports, an image gallery, hard to find manufacturers’ literature and valuable tools for configuring products, calculating total cost of ownership (TCO) and annual power usage. BLI also offers consulting and private, for-hire testing services that help manufacturers develop and market better products and consumables. 

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