Canon CanoScan 4400F review

Canon's sleek-looking 4400F can scan A4 documents like the rest, but its speciality is film. Whether you've got strips of 35mm negatives, positives or slides, the 4400F can digitise them swiftly and accurately.

It can accept six negatives at once, or four 35mm slides; just beware that the slide holder is too narrow to accept glass-mounted slides. Each 35mm frame took a little under two minutes to scan at 2,400dpi, slower than the Epson V100. We had no complaints about sharpness, but greens lacked vibrancy compared to the Epson. Canon's more expensive models have an extra infra-red sensor to weed out dust and scratches, but it's not provided in this budget model. Fortunately, the software tools provided for the same purpose worked quite well. We also liked the way that the frames in a strip of negatives were detected and split up, letting us tick those we wanted to scan.

For 6x4-inch photos, the 4400F was quicker than the V100, scanning at 600dpi in 13 seconds against the Perfection's 17 seconds. Again, greens weren't as punchy, but otherwise photos looked almost identical to the originals.

At the front of the CanoScan are seven buttons. These let you perform one-touch scanning straight to email or printer, and there are several for scanning to PDF; you can choose colour or mono without having to change any options in software, and it's simple to scan several pages into one final document, a good use of the PDF format. The 4400F also has Canon's 'Z-lid', which is double-hinged to let you to close it over originals up to an inch thick. Any scanner will scan reflective documents with the lid open if necessary, but the result may be compromised by heavy shadows.

Canon also bundles software for editing photos, OCR (converting printed pages into editable text) and managing your scanned documents.

This is a fast scanner that's easy to use, but the Epson offers better quality at a similar price.