Product Reviews

Two things make this scanner stand out immediately. First, it's sleek and gorgeous. Second, it has no power supply! It turns out the Canon gets its power straight from the USB cable - thanks to the use of an LED lamp, rather than the usual fluorescent tube, power consumption is rated at just 2.5W.

Ease of use

The driver is eminently pleasant to use. It's uncluttered, yet provides everything you need with the minimum of clicks.

ADVERTISEMENT

A particularly nice touch is the ability to rotate the scan preview - the number of times I put documents in the wrong way round - a nightmare for OCR.

ArcSoft PhotoStudio 2000 seems the business, and the accompanying Photo Base is handy for managing and viewing images. Omnipage Pro is an OCR powerhouse, with built-in spell checking that also throws up any characters it's unsure of.

Image

Canon has produced a number of ultra-sleek scanners, but in the past image quality hasn't been up to scratch. There are no such problems here, though. In both colour accuracy and focus tests, performance was pretty much faultless. Colours were vibrant and true, and although the 1,200dpi text displayed the slightest hint of blockyness, this was more down to understated interpolation than optical inaccuracy. Straight lines were as sharp as they come.

Overall

Although it's fairly pricey for a 600x1,200dpi model, quality surpasses higher-specified models. For all-round quality, this is the scanner to get.