Labs

Canon's CanoScan LiDE 600F combines a slim design and power efficiency with a very respectable resolution of 4,800x9,600dpi. Its metallic styling is in the same vein as the LiDE 90, but a more effective fold-out stand means it can be used in an upright position, and its hinged lid opens like a book, making this one of the most well-designed scanners here.

Rather than having a transparency scanning backlight in the lid, the scanner comes with a separate Film Adapter Unit. This clips neatly into place against the scanner's glass, but it accepts only strips of 35mm film, not slides. Film can be fiddly to position, too. Even with this extra unit plugged in, though, the scanner is powered through its USB connection, thanks to its use of a low-energy

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CIS sensor.

The LiDE 600F produced extremely sharp images, particularly at high resolutions, with the level of visible detail in scanned photos outstripping that of even Canon's more expensive CanoScan 8800F. Our negative scans also benefited from this clarity. Colours in our transparency scans were warm and realistic but looked a little dull and murky compared with scans made by Epson's Perfection V200 Photo, even when we used the FARE infrared dust, scratch and backlight correction feature.

The scanner benefits from Canon's excellent interface software, which retains previews and settings and provides a great deal of control over image quality. For document processing and OCR, Canon provides ScanSoft OmniPage SE. This did a passable job of document management, but was fairly poor at converting a scanned document to text, failing to include the entire page and placing text from different columns in the wrong order.

The LiDE 600F looks great and makes few compromises on quality, putting in an outstanding performance in our tests, from text documents to high-resolution transparency scans. It's an excellent scanner and an ideal choice if you're short on space, but we preferred the quality of the colour produced by Epson's less expensive Perfection V200 Photo, and the lack of slide support is disappointing.