Canon N670U review

Any A4 flatbed design is bound to take up a fair amount of desk space, so it's not just aesthetics that benefit from the Canon's dinky proportions.

If you're really desperate for space, it also comes with a stand to mount it vertically when not in use - and even a bit of Velcro to attach to the lid so you can use it in this position! However, inserting documents against a vertical plate is cumbersome to say the least. The Canon's sleek minimalism continues to the back of the unit. There's just a single USB port, as power is supplied directly from the PC - a real plus point if you're fed up with the maze of cables behind your computer.

The ScanGear TWAIN software takes care of all the usual settings such as resolution and colour modes, as well as providing previews to help select the area you want. Good TWAIN software is essential for fast, accurate scans, and this one fits the bill, with clearly laid out controls and an advanced mode for those who like to think in numbers. It's joined by an impressive collection of applications for processing scans. PhotoStudio, which covers image editing duties, borrows heavily from Adobe Photoshop, and considering the power of the latter, this is no bad thing. PhotoBase helps you organise your documents, and will come in very useful once you've got hundreds of scans on hard disk, while Omnipage SE is the cut-down version of our favourite OCR software for converting scanned documents into text.

This impressive array of hardware and software would amount to nothing if image quality weren't up to scratch. Canon has no worries here though - our test scans produced consistently immaculate results, with vivid, accurate colours, and focus that beats many scanners boasting a higher-specified optical sensor. The only area in which Canon failed to excel was our speed tests, with only average performance for previews and scans, though the software warns you of the slow rate if you try to scan areas at very high resolutions.

So do we like it? Well, it looks great, is easy to use, image quality is fantastic, and it's one of the cheapest scanner s we've reviewed. So that'll be a resounding "Yes" then. Only graphic design professionals should even consider buying anything else.

Author: Ben Pitt