One Small Step Towards The Paperless Spare Room (Canon Canoscan LiDE 30)

Member Name: Nomad

Product:	Canon Canoscan LiDE 30
Date:	11/10/03 (1069 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: No External Power Supply, Great Images, Very Easy To Use

Disadvantages: Not Especially Quick, A Little On The Noisy Side, No Transparency Adapter

At the start of this year I bought a new PC and with it came a whole new bundle of fun in the shape of Windows XP.

To be honest I wasn't looking forward to the change of operating systems but, almost a year on, I'm now quite fond of it. I was pretty lucky in that most of my hardware and software worked without any problems on the new system but I did have one casualty from the upgrade. My very old and very bulky scanner refused point blank to do anything at all.

In truth I had been thinking about changing it for a while before I bought my new PC but since my old scanner did the job (just about) I couldn't really justify the cost of a new one. However, after half-heartedly messing about with it for a couple of weeks under XP it was still having none of it so I decided it was a good excuse to get a newer model.

For anyone who hasn't used a scanner before it's quite a useful piece of kit which is used to create an electronic copy of any paperwork or printed images. This can then be stored on the computer or archived to CD. I had used one mostly to scan photographs and I also had some paperwork that I wanted to archive.

I'm not a heavy user of the scanner so the hunt for a replacement went on the back burner for a while until around a month ago when I decided to have a bit of a clear out. This somehow resulted in an even bigger stack of paperwork that I needed to scan.

After a little research on the internet to check out what features I should be looking for and what prices I could expect to pay I went shopping to see what I could find.

The model I ended up with was the Canon CanoScan LiDE 30 (apparently LiDE stands for LED Indirect Exposure). The RRP is about £80 although when I bought it at Currys they had it reduced to £60. I've included more technical details at the end of this review but in essence it's a 48 bit USB 2 colour flatbed scanner suitable for use on Windows or Mac ope
rating systems.

The box contains a USB cable, software CD, quick start manual, a stand and the scanner itself (glad they remembered that). Installing onto Windows XP was a breeze. Before you connect the scanner, pop the CD in the drive and you'll get told what software is going to be installed (more on the bundled software later). You can choose not to install certain programs if you so desire. I only needed to agree to the licenses - I wonder if anyone actually bothers to read them? - and within 15 minutes it was all installed and ready to go.

The scanner attaches to the PC via a USB cable which it also uses to provide it's power, meaning that it doesn't require a separate power lead which is a nice feature. It has a Z shaped hinged lid, which simply means that you can scan quite large items, such as books. It's also fairly light at 1.5 Kg but still appears to be quite robust.

There are smaller scanners available but this is still quite a slim and sleek little machine, substantially smaller than my previous monolith of a scanner. The stand enables you to place the scanner vertically on its side rather than the more usual horizontal. It's a great way to store the scanner if you're a little short of desk space and you can still scan even while it is in its stand. In practice it is not the easiest thing to do since managing to close the lid without moving whatever you are trying to scan can be a little frustrating. You are better off if you need a long session on the scanner but it's fine for the odd couple of sheets.

The bundled software includes a number of useful tools. They are: -
Canon Scangear CS - Twain compliant driver
CanoScan Toolbox - Scanning utility software
ArcSoft PhotoStudio - Image editing software for editing your images
ArcSoft PhotoBase - Image album software for organising and storing your images
Scansoft Omnipage SE - OCR software for scanning paper doc
uments and turning them into editable text
Electronic manuals and Acrobat Reader

I've been using it for over three weeks and apart from changing the resolution of the scans (a higher resolution means better quality images but larger files), I haven't needed to tinker with the software settings. In my book that can only be a good thing and goes to show how straightforward the whole scanning process is. Despite that the Toolbox software allows you to play about with all of the settings and also enables you to create up to ten separate images from one pass on the scanner.

I also haven't made much use of PhotoStudio or PhotoBase. I usually have a hard time getting to grips with graphics packages but I'm very happy with Paint Shop Pro and tend to stick with that for all my image processing needs but PhotoShop does seem to be fairly straightforward.

Similarly with Windows XP providing the ability to view thumbnails of all images in a directory I haven't found much use for PhotoBase although back in the days of my Windows 98 machine I'm sure I would have found this very useful.

The electronic manuals provide full details of the software and scanner (the English portion of the paperwork is only a quick start guide). You'll need Acrobat Reader to view them but in the unlikely event you don?t already have it installed a copy is included on the CD.

For me the real jewel in the software crown is Omnipage OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software, which has proved very useful. It converts printed text into editable text for use in your word processor. This is great if you've a printed document but lost the original electronic file and it will save you having to type everything in again. You will need to spend a few minutes running some sample scans the first time you use the software but otherwise it is very straightforward and quite effective.

There are three so-called EZ buttons on
the front of the scanner which provide immediate access to three functions: -
Scan - Immediately kicks off a scan and opens the relevant image software.
Email - Scans the selected item and places it in an email ready to send
Copy - Scans and sends the resulting file to the printer turning your scanner and printer into a somewhat expensive photocopier.

The first time you use the email button you be asked to confirm which email client you are using (outlook express in my case) but the print button works immediately assuming the printer is switched on ready to go. To be honest most scans that I plan to make will be for the purpose of archiving and therefore I don't expect I'll have that much use for the email and copy buttons but they are a nice touch.

So far we have found out that it's slim, light, installs easily and is very straightforward to use but none of that is particularly useful if the resulting scans are poor quality. Fortunately, they are not.

Images and text are crisp and clear. Unlike my old scanner, which often produced dark or slightly muddy scans, the images produced on the LiDE 30 are very faithful copies of the original. It has very good colour reproduction including accurate skin tones, which many scanners seem to have a problem with.

As I've already mentioned this scanner uses its USB connection for both its power and to transfer the data. The downside of this is the resulting scan times. It takes about 50-60 seconds to scan a full A4 page, such as a page from a magazine, at a resolution of 300 dpi. It may not seem like much but if you intend to use it a lot you may want to look for something a little quicker since the speed of this particular model falls below average for similarly priced machines.

Personally I don't find it much of an inconvenience but then I guess I am a fairly light user. It may also be worth pointing out that my PC has USB 1 ports. If you have U
SB 2 connections you may well find things a little quicker.

The second possible issue is that while it's scanning it is not exactly what you would call quiet. I'm not talking deafening here and as far as I'm concerned it's not as noisy as my last scanner. That said I have used a number of other scanners both on friends' machines and at work and most of them have been quieter. As I usually have music playing in the background it's soon taken care of but all the same it's something you should be aware of if you are specifically looking for a quiet scanner.

Finally I should point out that it doesn't come with any sort of transparency adapter. This isn't much of a complaint for a budget scanner and you will generally pay more for this feature but it's worth knowing if you would like the ability to be able to scan slides or negatives.

If you are an internet user you'll be able to find it selling for around £50 or £60 on sites such as Dabs.com or pcworld.co.uk although I can't image that Tesco.com are selling many at £100 a pop. If you don't mind hunting around the high street you'll probably find it for around the £60 or £70 mark. As I've said I bought it at Currys for £60.

In summary this is a very nice scanner that is simple to setup and use yet produces some great results. It comes with a very respectable software bundle that helps to make the scanning and archiving process very straightforward.

You may need to give the speed issue some thought if you think you'll be using it a lot but otherwise the pro's far outweigh the con's and I would highly recommend this to any home user in the market for a good quality yet reasonably priced scanner.


Thanks for reading

© Nomad 2003



Specifications
------------------
Canon CanoScan Color Image Scanner LiDE 30
Optical Resolution - 1200 x 2400 dpi
<b

r>Scanning Bit
Depth - 48 bit input
Interface - USB 2
Dimensions - 256 x 383 x 34 mm
Weight - 1.5 Kg (3.3 lbs)
Max Document Size - A4


Requirements
-----------------
Windows XP, 2000, ME, 98 SE, 98
Memory - 64MB (128MB for XP)
Hard Disk Space - 229mb for all software

Mac OS9, OSX V10.1 or later (classic mode only)
Memory - 64 MB (128mb on OSX)
Hard Disk Space - 109mb for all software


Some websites worth a look
-----------------------------------
The Canon LiDE 30 at Dabs.com -
http://www.dabs.com/uk/productview?quicklinx=2 4N2?id=KK&page=http://www.dabs.c om/24N2KK

Official Canon Website. Obviously biased but plenty of information.
http://www.canon.co.uk/about_us/news/consumer_ releases/canoscan_cslide20_30.as p

Summary: