Canon Canoscan

This sleek flatbed scanner in metallic dark blue-gray colors is a no-frills scanner with a USB interface. Its flatbed cover (called Z-lid) has a flexible hinge that can accommodate thick books. As far as scan quality goes, it’s quite impressive for ordinary color photographs and regular images. But don’t expect it to pick up finely detailed pictures with full accuracy even at its highest resolution. The maximum document size that can fit in is A4.

The scanner does a preview scan in about 17 sec, while full color and grayscale scans at 1200 dpi took about 11 and 4 minutes respectively. Scans at 100 dpi were quite fast at 28 and 47 seconds for color and grayscale. Scans in grayscale mode took longer than those in color mode in the 100 dpi scans. Other supported modes include grayscale and enhanced text.

The scanner comes with a useful software bundle including Canon ScanGear, ArcSoft PhotoStudio 2000, ScanSoft OmniPage Pro. Canon ScanGear is an easy-to-use toolbar application to mail, fax or simply store the scans. PhotoStudio is a graphics editor and OmniPage is an OCR software. We got very high accuracy in doing OCR of simple-paragraph documents, but it did gave a. few formatting errors in multicolumn documents.

Shekhar Govindarajan at PCQLabs