The latest member of the Canoscan family, the Lide 80 is aimed at those who want a bit of style along with their substance. The flatbed unit is the first CIS scanner to offer A4 scanning at 2,400 x 4,800dpi while standing just 38mm high.

Other features in the Canon's favour include speedy USB2 connection and the ability to scan strips of 35mm film via a supplied plug-in adaptor. It's a clunky solution but if you need to get transparencies into your PC it works well, using built-in infra-red image enhancement to get the best results from damaged or faded images.

The scanner also sensibly takes its power directly from your PC, which means only one lead, and can be used standing on its side if necessary.

One-touch 'EZ' buttons at the front allow documents to be quickly and automatically scanned, copied via your printer, attached to emails and saved to a file, though you can delve into things manually via the supplied Arcsoft Photostudio software. Canon also bundles other applications including Photobase and Presto Page Manager for archiving images, Omnipage SE for OCR (optical character recognition) and Adobe Photoshop Elements.

Our tests produced mixed but mostly favourable results. Colour scans of magazine pages and photos were consistently noise-free and we were particularly impressed with images from the transparency unit. OCR performance was also above average, though this is as much down to Omnipage as to Canon's technology. However, scans of other materials, such as CD sleeves and other artwork were a little disappointing, and in operation the unit gives out a whine that could quickly annoy users in a quiet home office.

Contact: Canon 08705 143 723
www.canon.co.uk

Specifications:

• Windows 98, 2000, ME, XP, Mac OS 9 and OS X (v10.1.3 or later Native mode)
• Flatbed CIS scanner
• Max resolution 2,400 x 4,800dpi
• 48bit colour depth
• Arcsoft Photostudio 5, Arcsoft Photobase 3, Omnipage SE, Presto Page Manager, Canon utilities
• 2kg
• 258 x 374 x 38mm (w x d x h)
• USB2