Kodak Alaris, a company that was spun off from Kodak last year, says it has a new tool for some of its scanner products which is gaining new customers who want to preserve photographs, including the Mormon Church.
The church is very active in genealogy and it provides a service called FamilySearch, which includes a massive collection of records, photos and stories. They are now using some scanning systems developed by Kodak Alaris, which the company says makes it easier to digitize photos and upload them to a website.
Bruce Holroyd, is a worldwide product manager with Kodak Alaris. He says these scanners work a lot more efficiently in copying photos than the standard home scanner you might purchase.
"That speed is 10 times, 100 times faster than putting them individually down on a flatbed scanner that you typically see at home that takes minutes to scan each one of the photos or documents."
Holroyd says the scanners are being purchased by places like libraries and museums, but he says even some individuals are buying them when they have a lot of photos to archive. The two scanners range in price from about $2100 to about $3500 dollars.
All of the research and development on the systems is done in Rochester. The devices are manufactured at Kodak Alaris' operations in China. The scanner systems are manufactured through Kodak Alaris' document imaging division. It also has a personalized imaging division which is involved in photo kiosks and other products.
