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.

There's a seven-segment LED display on the front panel of the scanner and the numbers from 1 to 9 refer to set scan modes, pre-defined as part of the smart touch system. Modes cover presets like low-res black and white, through OCR levels, to full-colour, 600dpi; the maximum resolution of the scanner. The modes are set by number with a front-panel button, so it takes just a few clicks to set up a scan. All modes are configurable, so you can mix and match for the settings you want.

As well as the software supporting smart touch, there are copies of Paperport and OmniPage, both industry-standard applications from Nuance and both in very recent versions. There's also Presto! Bizcard, which enables the scanning and storing of business cards. The software can OCR the details from a card or store its image in a PC-based album.

Although there's no multi-feed detection, and we did see a few mis-feeds, the quality of scans is generally good, with automatic straightening and image enhancement. Kodak's Perfect Page technology can identify photo and text areas and separately enhance both. In practice the scans we saw, whether scanning for archival or OCR, were readable and showed few recognition errors, though this may be down to OmniPage as much as the scanner.

The Kodak ScanMate i1120 is a good general-purpose, sheet-feed business scanner. Being able to scan both sides of a page at once can save a lot of time and duplex scanning isn't always standard with scanners in this price range. Barring a few mis-feeds and an untidy output tray, there are few problems.