Canon Canoscan LiDE 25

Canon's LiDE scanners are renowned for being extremely thin because they use LED technology to scan images, which allows for smaller, lighter devices. It has been said that these scanners are inferior to those using standard fluorescent lamps for scanning, but we found the LiDE 25 to produce high-quality images.

Installation of the software using the supplied CD is simple and, unlike printers, scanners tend to come with USB cables so it's simply a matter of installing the drivers using the supplied CD and plugging in the cable.

As well as the drivers, the disc includes image-editing software ArcSoft PhotoStudio 5.5 and ScanSoft Omnipage SE for OCR, but it will also work with all other image-editing programs that support Windows scanning facilities.

Image quality was very high at the default 300dpi resolution, and superb at the highest 1200dpi setting, although this produced an image with an almost unworkably large file size.

Scanning time was reasonable at 16 seconds to preview, then 60 seconds to scan an A4 page at 300dpi, although it took nearly nine minutes at 1200dpi. Colour balance is good and the images were sharp and clear.

PhotoStudio offers basic image editing, and Omnipage produced high-quality transcriptions of test text, with a handy wizard to step through the process.

Although it doesn't come with the extra features to be found on more expensive models, for those scanning simple documents and books, the LiDE 25 is an excellent choice.