Business scanners, designed for high speed conversion of paper documents to digital ones, can cost a lot, but Kodak’s ScanMate i1120 comes in at under £400 which is comparatively inexpensive. The ScanMate is designed much like other sheet-feed scanners, with pages feeding from the near-vertical tray at the top, down through the device and out to an output tray that sits nearly parallel with the desktop, at the front.

To reduce the footprint of the scanner, Kodak has angled the downward path steeply, so paper has to make a sharp turn onto the output tray. This means sheets rub against each other and a batch can look pretty untidy by the end of a run. Both the input and output trays fold away when the scanner isn’t in use.

The ScanMate has dual scan heads, so one or both sides of a page can be scanned at once. Kodak rates the ScanMate i1120 at 20ppm and when scanning at 200dpi, suitable for archival as PDF files, we saw slightly more than the rated speed. It drops as the resolution increases, of course, and at 300dpi, the minimum needed for Optical Character Recognition (OCR), it’s taking nearly two minutes for 20 pages.