Labs

Although it costs just £8 more than HP's Scanjet G2410, Canon's CanoScan LiDE 90 looks better and has higher specifications. It's compact and unobtrusive, with slim lines and a metallic finish. A detachable stand allows it to be used propped on its side, but we found that positioning pages correctly was difficult with the scanner in this position.

The lid has a neatly designed hinge that swivels and lifts, enabling you to scan pages from thick books. Counterintuitively, you have to scan pages upside down, with the top of the page at the bottom edge of the scanner.

The scanner is USB powered, which cuts down on the number of cables you have to trail across your desk. We were surprised to see that it uses a mini-USB

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port like those found on digital cameras, but the necessary USB cable was provided in the box.

The LiDE 90 has a respectable maximum resolution of 2,400x4,800dpi, but the higher the scan resolution you choose, the longer the scan takes: at 600dpi a 6x4in photo took just 18 seconds to scan, while at 1,200dpi the same photo took four-and-a-half minutes.

Fortunately, the quality of scans was very high. Tiny details were captured accurately at high resolutions, and colours were generally very faithful to those of the originals, although some shades were not quite as vivid. There's no option for scanning film or transparencies, though, so this scanner is limited to standard documents, photos and books.

The LiDE 90 comes with a basic range of software, including a utility for configuring its four automatic scan buttons, the rather poor ScanSoft OmniPage SE OCR software, which failed to produce accurate results, and ArcSoft's PhotoStudio image-editing package. Canon's excellent TWAIN interface doesn't skimp on features, though, with an advanced mode that provides control over every aspect of the process.

The LiDE 90 is a good budget scanner for home use, producing excellent scans at high resolutions. Its poor software, particularly for OCR, and slow speeds at high resolution are frustrating, though.