Product Reviews

The flatbed scanners we've looked at recently fall into two design categories. There are the more traditional units whose footprints are only slightly larger than their A4 scanning area, but are four or five inches high, and then there are the waif-like supermodels that only rise about an inch-and-a-half from your desk. Canon's CanoScan FB330P falls into the latter category.

The ultra-slim design is possible through use of an LED (light-emitting diode) to illuminate the subject that's being scanned, rather than the fluorescent tubes used by the rest. This means no warm-up time is required. It also means a theoretically increased life span, although in normal use a fluorescent tube-based design will last pretty much forever, anyway.

An important fact to bear in mind when shopping for scanners is the interface they use - in other words, the way they connect to your PC. The most popular one used to be the parallel port, the connector more commonly used for printers. But these days the preferred method is USB (universal serial bus). This is more convenient and faster than a parallel port,

If you're scanning in a lot of documents, speed will be important. The golden rule here is simply to avoid parallel port units if you can, since the Canon took over 8 minutes to complete a text scan, as opposed to an average of around three minutes for USB models.

Even if, like most people, you're not planning to use your scanner for especially serious work, you should still demand the best image quality you can get. Producing enlargements, for example, is an exceedingly taxing task that depends crucially on the focus of the scanner. OCR is less fussy - but again, the closer the scan is to the original document, the better the recognition results will be.

In our comparative test of seven scanners the Canon came bottom in terms of image quality. Its Achilles heel is an optical resolution of only 300x600dpi. All the other machines at least doubled these figures, so it couldn't pick out anything like the amount of detail of the others.

The colour performance of the various models was a much closer call, but Canon lost points here too, giving images that were ultimately just a tad too dark. Finally, we moved to the black-and-white text test. Once again, the Canon's low resolution meant it never really made it off the starting blocks.

If you really want a scanner that's as compact as possible, then we'd recommend the Mustek ScanExpress 1200CU. It's well built, looks very professional, has USB, a 600x1200 resolution, and a definite image-quality advantage over the Canon.