The i1400 range of devices refreshes the Rochester, New York-based company’s offering in the market for scanners handling between 3,000 and 10,000 documents per day, said David Whitton, cluster manager for Northern Europe for Kodak’s Graphic Comms Group.

When we first entered that market earlier this decade with the i200 series we took 35%-40% share, but now we’ve slipped back to 20%, so this launch is designed to help us regain market leadership, he said.

The new series comprises three models: the entry-level i1410, a simplex (i.e. single-sided), 60ppm scanner with a list price of 4,500 euros ($6,200); the i1420, a duplex, 60ppm device listing at 6,000 euros ($8,200) and the i1440, a duplex, 75ppm device with a list price of 8,500 euros ($11,600). Whitton said the products are designed to compete aggressively, with the i1420 priced below the i200 and delivering 50% more pages per minute.

Other features include the inclusion, as default, of an imprinter to add dates, time stamps and indexing, which other scanners offer only as a separately priced extra, and the ability to buy a tethered flatbed to attach to the scanners which, in addition to delivering A3 scanning for documents that cannot be passed through a roller-based machine, can also be attached to one of the company’s A4-only devices such as the i1200 and i1300 ranges for the same purpose.

The i1400 family will, in fact, replace the i200 over time, just as the higher-end i1800 series, launched with the i1860 in November and augmented with the i1840 in April, superseded the i800. Whitton said that while the i1860 is a 200ppm machine listing at 80,000 euros ($109,000) for production environments such as tax authorities, customs services and big outsourcers, the i1840 fills the gap between that device and our i600 series, which goes up to 120ppm), with throughput of 160ppm and a list price of 70,000 euros [$95,000].

These devices face a different set of competitors, he went on. They fit in our range between the i600, which competes mainly with Bell + Howell and Banctec, and the really high-end, 240ppm-350ppm devices, where we sell and support the products from IBML [the IBM LLC document capture device business], where again the competitor is Banctec.