Canon Canoscan FB121OU

Only a few years ago, scanners were hugely expensive items that only graphics professionals and rich gadget fiends could afford. Now, of course, you can pick up a perfectly decent model for less than fifty quid. So why exactly would you want to spend five or six times more than that on the Canoscan FB121OU?

Well, the answer is you probably wouldn't unless you are very serious about getting the best quality scans for your photos and transparencies. On the techie side, the FB121OU offers true 1200dpi resolution thanks to its Galileo lens and 42bit colour depth (14bit for each RGB colour), resulting in more than four trillion colours. This is, frankly, an extravagance that provides more information than an average home user would ever need or, indeed, than the human eye can see.

Meanwhile, in the cosmetic department, the FB121OU would make a very attractive desktop accessory. It's a slimline unit with a 'platinum coloured' brushed metal lid protecting the standard size 216x297mm scannable area. It is compatible with both PCs and Apple Macs and set-up is a piece of cake using the USB socket on its rear and the cable provided. The scanner was also fairly quick in our tests, scanning a full A4 page at 300dpi in just over a minute.

The software package that comes with the FB121OU is pretty generous and includes, among other things, Adobe Photoshop LE and Caere Omnipage LE. These are top-notch tools for photo-manipulation and optical character recognition respectively.

Should you wish, you can buy the FB121OU with an FAU-S11 film adapter unit so that you can scan 35mm film negatives or positive transparencies of anything up to 101x127mm in size. Of course, this additional accessory pushes the cost of the scanner up even further.

It looks good and is a great performer, but the FB121OU is really only for users who want, and can afford, to produce the highest-quality scans.

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