Kodak S2085f review: A ferociously fast network scanner

Not everyone needs a scanner costing upwards of £1,500, but if you have a daily paper mountain to climb then Kodak’s S2085f could be the answer. This mighty desktop scanner boasts superfast 85ppm scanning and a giant 300-page motorised elevator tray. It’s rated for up to 20,000 pages per day, and just in case you need to scan the odd awkwardly shaped item, it comes with a secondary A4 flatbed scanner built in too.

You can use the S2085f over either USB 3 or Gigabit Ethernet (but not both together), and it doesn’t require a high-powered host as it has its own internal CPU to handle image processing and enhancement. There’s a capacious output tray at the front, while a side lever opens up the rear, allowing you to feed through and scan documents up to 4.1m long.

Network installation is a cinch. The scanner’s touchscreen walks you through the process of enabling the Ethernet port, after which we ran the driver installer on a Windows PC. This discovered the scanner right away, and happily connected to it as soon as we’d entered its unique pairing ID.

Kodak’s Smart Touch software makes even huge scan tasks easy to configure and run. You can create up to 20 profiles to appear in the display panel for swift two-tap scanning, and each profile links to a settings shortcut that defines colour and resolution options. You can also add image controls such as anti-skew, blank page skipping or file separation using barcodes, and specify whether to use the document hopper or the flatbed scanner.

A destination and a file output type are specified too – you can choose from a selection of image and document formats, including searchable PDFs. Destinations can include a local or networked folder, a printer, an application, an email address (via either the host’s client software or an SMTP server) or a SharePoint server. If the scanner is shared between multiple users, you can register up to ten Smart Touch installations for walk-up scanning; users just need to select their name from a menu and enter a password or a PIN to send scans directly to their workstation.

There’s native support for Box, Evernote and Google Drive too, although for Dropbox and OneDrive you’ll have to scan to the sync folder on the host PC.

The bundled Capture Pro Limited Edition software adds single batch scanning and enhanced image processing, along with support for PDF encryption. The full version of the software adds data capture and indexing, image merging and multiple batch conversion; this costs £529 per year for Kodak Group B scanners.

The S2085f is certainly fast. It thundered through a pile of 60 bank statements at an average of 86ppm – in both colour and greyscale, and at both 200pdi and 300dpi resolution. Even going to 600dpi didn’t have any impact on greyscale scanning speed, and while colour performance dropped to 37.5ppm, that’s still pretty speedy. It’s largely academic anyway, as scan quality at 200dpi will easily satisfy your inner archivist.

One word of caution: when we say “thundered”, we mean it. During our tests, we measured very loud sound levels of up to 70dB from one metre in front. You will ideally want to give this scanner its own space, away from desks and telephones.

Still, though noisy, this beast isn’t violent. It handled our statements, till receipts and courier bills without any problems, and its fast double-feed detection stopped any from getting damaged when a jam occurred.

The S2085f will be overkill for many offices, but if you need to scan on an industrial scale, it has what it takes to keep up. Performance is excellent, output quality is impeccable and the integrated flatbed makes it supremely versatile.

Kodak S2085f specifications