Our primary complaint with what is available now is that they are print drivers. Amyuni has a pretty dynamic installation, and may be controlled easily with interop through .NET, but it is still a printer driver. Additionally, it can only convert to JPG.
PeerNet Pro is licensed per printer and must be installed manually. It's only around $135 per copy, which is reasonable, but the control of the driver is not the best. However, they do offer a nice variety of image formats, compression, etc.
Black Ice, we'd never used it. I downloaded a trial and tested it, however, it left alot to be desired from the automation standpoint. Black Ice also seemed to have a nice variety of formats.
From years of searching and reviewing, the document and imaging industry is seriously lacking in usable components, in my humble opinion. There is plenty of tools available to convert from one image format to another, and it's very easy to do with .NET. However, what is missing is an automated way, without a Printer Driver, to generate a document, as an image. So, for example:
1. Create a Word document
2. Add merge information to the document
3. Merge the document to a new document
4. Render the document as a Single page TIFF
5. Save the TIFF to a folder and import to an storage and retrieval system
The one caveat to this, is it should be done via a multi-threadable service
