The killer "shoebox scanner" you can't buy

Wouldn't it be great if there were a desktop scanner that could, in a few hours,  digitize all the old snapshots you keep in that shoebox in your closet? I talked about it with my co-workers in our podcast because I'd heard pre-PMA rumors about such a device. But I was still surprised to find it in plain sight on the PMA07 show floor yesterday. It's called the Kodak i1210.   

What makes this scanner different than the ones in Staples is that, unlike a flatbed scanner on which you must carefully place a small group photos side by side, this baby has an automatic document feeder into which you can place a healthy batch of photos of various sizes all at once. It scans up to 30 letter-sized documents per minute at 200 dpi, a decent resolution for snapshots. (At higher resolution, the rate drops a bit but it's still miles ahead of a flatbed scanner in terms of convenience.) And you can keep adding snapshots as scanning proceeds.

I watched the woman at the booth scan the three photos shown in the picture I snapped from the show floor and posted for this blog. (Click the thumbnail image for a larger view.) The photos went through the scanner in just a few seconds. And should an occasional snapshot go through slightly askew, the scanning software will rotate the digitized image so it looks like you fed it in perfectly straight. Kind of like orthodontia for snapshots.

So let's see: Thirty per minute times 60 equals…1,800 per hour! That's overly optimistic, especially since Kodak's recommended daily volume is 1,500 pages. Still, even if you scan in a mere 500 in an evening, how long would it take to put your family's entire history on a DVD that you could then duplicate for all your relatives? Less than a week?

So what's the catch? Well, the cheapest version of the i1210 (which scans only one-sided documents) costs $799. Pricey, but about the same as Epson's priciest flatbed scanner.

And you can get 500 or more photos scanned for 39 cents each at DigMyPics.com or up to 1,000 scanned for $49.95 at www.ScanMyPhotos.com But with those kinds of services, you must ship your precious photos through the mail and hope they don't get lost.

Why Kodak won't sell you one

The i1210's price is moot for now because Kodak won't sell it to consumers. They won't even sell it to someone else to sell to consumers. This is strictly a product for business use. After chatting with some of Kodak's executives at PMA07, I think I understand their business strategy. They'd rather a consumer pay for scanning services and buy lots of the profitable goodies that go with it — such as photo books and mugs — than own his or her own "printing press." Sounds a lot like what Kodak's business model used to be in the film days, before cheap inkjet printers freed us all from paying for developing and printing billions of snapshots we didn't want, on top of the ones we liked.

It's particularly ironic that Kodak should be treating consumers this way, because the company just took an opposite, pro-consumer approach in entering the inkjet printer market with consumables priced below entrenched players like Canon, Epson, and HP. A Kodak exec told me that they took this approach because their research showed that pricey ink was one of consumers' biggest gripes about inkjet printers. I guess when you're a newcomer to a market, it's good business to put the consumer first, but when you're established in one, you can take a "what's good for us is good for the consumer" approach.

Still, now that the scanner is out of the bag, so to speak, isn't only a matter of time before HP or Epson or some other scanner maker brings out a product so many of us would love to have and, eventually, gets the price down to $100 to $200? The history of the technology market indicates that this is inevitable. It's just not clear how long we will have to drool over the Kodak i1210 before someone liberates all those shoeboxes in our closets.

-- Jeff Fox, Technology Editor

—Jeffrey Fox