Canon CanoScan LiDE 35 review

The CanoScan LiDE 35 is a dinky scanner, hardly bigger than an A4 sheet.

It's only an inch thick, and Canon provides a stand that enables you to store the scanner on its side, saving even more desk space. You can even use it in this position, although anything more than a piece of paper will fall out of the scanner, as the lid doesn't clamp shut. It does have a nifty double hinge at the back, though, that allows you to scan objects up an inch thick when closed. This is useful if you're scanning from books or thick magazines, but works only when the scanner is lying flat. Unlike the rest of the case, the lid is made of metal. This is important as it protects the fragile glass scanning surface.

A long USB lead connects the LiDE 35 to a PC's USB port. This supplies the power too, so you don't need a separate power supply. Once you have installed the driver software, you can either scan directly from programs such as Paint Shop Pro, or from the ScanGear software supplied with the scanner. This provides the usual selection of scanning options and has both simple and advanced modes, depending on how much tweaking you want to carry out before scanning.

If this all sounds like too much effort, pressing one of the four buttons on the front of the LiDE 35 triggers a pre-defined scan option. 'Copy' makes a colour scan and sends it to your printer; 'Scan' automatically opens the scanned image in the application of your choice; 'File' saves it in My Documents and 'Email' makes a low resolution scan and attaches it to an e-mail. You can change the settings for each option before making a scan but the default settings work just fine - scanning doesn't get any easier than this.

The LiDE 35 is a little noisy to use (the motor whines audibly). On the bright side, though, scan quality is very good. We scanned a full-colour document at 300dpi in 30 seconds. Colours were very accurate, with blues in particular appearing well saturated. There was no sign of an unwanted overall tint or 'colour cast'. No digital 'noise' (usually speckly interference) could be seen.

For all its good points, though, the LiDE 35 is still slightly slower than our current Top 50 model, the Canon 3200F, which takes ten seconds less to scan a 300dpi A4 page. Also, the LiDE 35 has no facilities for scanning negatives or slides - a pain if you want to digitise your entire photo collection. For these reasons, the LiDE 35 fails to capture our Top 50 Best Buy award.