Flatbed scanners used to be the size of drop-leaf dining tables and cost about the same. These days, they're barely larger than the sheets of paper that sit under their lids and there are models that'll give plenty of change from a £50 note.

You'll need a couple of notes to buy the CanoScan LiDE 30 but it is only 1.5in thick and can be used, albeit rather awkwardly, on its side.

The dinky size is due to the use of a low-power LED light source, rather than the fluorescent lamps traditionally used in flatbed scanners. This also means that the LiDE 30 can be powered by a USB port.

The LiDE 30 plugs into a USB port on either a PC or Mac and if you have USB 2 you can make use of the faster speeds that bestows too.

There's a CD-Rom stuffed with utilities and applications but all you really need to install get going are the driver and any Twain-compatible application.

Making a scan is simple. Press one of the three buttons on the front (scan, copy, email) and it automatically starts the appropriate application.

You can also scan manually from an application of your choice and the scanner control window that appears offers both simple and advanced views.

Unfortunately, when it comes to performance, the LiDE 30 is a bit of a letdown.

Colour photos come out pretty well but scanning anything else can give some strange results. Scanning our black-and-white scanner test sheet in colour, for example, produced all manner of horrible colour 'noise' and although switching to 'greyscale' solved the problem, that's hardly the point.

Similarly, the scanner failed miserably when we tried to scan shallow 3D objects (a watch, for example) - something that other flatbed scanners handle perfectly well.

This is apparently a side effect of using LED but it does mean this scanner is nowhere near as versatile as other models.

DETAILS
Price: £99

Contact: Canon 0800 252 223
www.canon.co.uk