Canon CANOSCAN LIDE 50 SCANNER 12000X2400DPI 48BIT (Canon-7876A002)

WHAT'S HOT: Canon's CanoScan Lide 50 has a number of characteristics that should appeal to home scanner users, including a low price ($100), a compact design, and the ability to produce high-quality scanned images. At only 10.1 inches wide by 14.7 inches deep by 1.5 inches high and weighing just 4 pounds, the Lide 50 is easy to set up and will fit in tight quarters. Furthermore, the included plastic stand lets you use the scanner while it's perched vertically, so it takes up even less space. In informal tests, the Lide 50 was fairly easy to use in its vertical position; however, you can scan only one photo or document at a time in this orientation, whereas you can put multiple items on the scanning bed when it's lying flat on your desk.

In our standard image-quality tests, the Lide 50 performed well overall. Color and monochrome scans looked crisp, due in part to the unit's use of an Unsharp Mask filter, a common default setting that Canon automatically applies on most of its scanners. The Lide 50 scored highest for a color photo scanned at 100 dpi and viewed on-screen, and for a printout of line art (scanned at its maximum 1200-dpi resolution) that includes fine lines, geometric patterns, and small type. On our other tests, including gray-scale scans and color photo printouts, the Lide 50's scores were closer to average.

WHAT'S NOT: The Lide 50 come without a transparency adapter or automatic document feeder, and neither is available for purchase separately. Unlike the lids on most scanners, the Lide 50's is not removable (though it does expand up to 1 inch in height), which may prevent you from scanning portions of oversize books. Because its optical resolution maxes out at 1200 dpi--and because it can't scan slides--the Lide 50 is not ideal for making scans that you intend to blow up very large. But for less-demanding scanning tasks, its resolution is perfectly adequate. Our test scans at 1200 dpi seem to bear this out: A scan of line art at 1200 dpi that was viewed at full size on-screen earned average scores, and a 2-by-2 inch photo that we scanned at 1200 dpi and blew up to 8 by 12 inches to view as a print earned slightly above-average scores.

WHAT ELSE: The Lide 50 draws power through its USB 2.0 connection, so a separate AC adapter is not required. The lack of direct electrical power, however, makes this scanner somewhat slower than some other USB 2.0 units. Whereas the Lide 50 took 44 seconds to complete a color scan, most of the units took 35 to 40 seconds, and the HP Scanjet 5550c finished the test in just 21 seconds.

Four handy push buttons--for copying, scanning, e-mailing, and scanning to a file--provide easy access to common scanning tasks. For example, you can use the file button to scan multipage documents directly into a single PDF file. ScanGear CS, Canon's TWAIN driver, offers both simple and advanced modes, and also has a proficient Multi-Scan mode for automatically scanning, cropping, and saving a batch of images. For users who want to scan and save as much raw color information as possible, the scanner driver also supports 48-bit images both internally and externally.

The generous software bundle includes two image editors (ArcSoft PhotoStudio, which supports 48-bit color images, and Adobe Photoshop Elements 2), file managers for both documents (Presto PageManager 6.0) and images (ArcSoft PhotoBase), and an optical character recognition application (ScanSoft OmniPage SE OCR) for efficiently turning scanned documents into editable text.

UPSHOT: The compact Canon CanoScan Lide 50 is an excellent choice for home users who want an easy-to-use scanner capable of delivering fine images at a low price. But people who need very quick scans may prefer a faster model.