With a recommended retail price of just £59, Canon's latest scanner is aimed squarely at the entry-level market and boasts some useful office-centric features.

Four shortcut buttons on the front are used for scanning, copying, producing an image file and creating email attachments. These can be changed to support other features, such as OCR (optical character recognition) or pdf creation.

With the email option, you can also scan an image at a user-specified sizes up to 900KB. This is a handy way to email images to friends and colleagues without worrying about having to compress attachments.

The Canoscan 35 is much like the older Canoscan 30, benefiting from a slim design (38mm) and bendy Z-lid, which accommodates large documents. However, this model has an increased optical scanning resolution of 1,200 x 2,400ppi and 48bit colour depth.

It was fairly quick in our tests, taking just 10 seconds to create a preview image in the Scangear CS driver. From here, it took 11 seconds to scan an A4 image at its lowest resolution setting of 75ppi. Scanning at 300 took 26 seconds, while 600 took 48 seconds, which is pretty good. Working at its maximum optical resolution of 1,200ppi took a lot longer - just over five minutes.

Scanning the front cover of PCW produced a slightly grainy, banded image at all resolutions, but overall the quality was good. You can apply settings in the driver to improve the picture, such as dust and scratch removal.

The Canoscan is powered by the USB cable. Bundled software includes Arcsoft Photostudio 5.5, Scansoft Omnipage SE and Adobe Acrobat for viewing pdf files. In all, the Lide 35 is a reasonably fast and affordable scanner.

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

Specifications:

• 1,200 x 2,400ppi optical resolution
• 48bit internal colour depth
• USB2
• Z-lid
• Arcsoft Photostudio 5.5
• Scansoft Omnipage SE
• Adobe Acrobat