No Power Supply - "So what" you say? I have had to replace at least one scanner power supply and I know of at least one friend who has two scanners he has sidelined because the power supplies died. I'm not sure if there is something unique about scanners that causes unusually high power supply failure - but in my experiences it has been a trend. A generic replacement power supply that is powerful enough to drive a standard scanner can be between $18-25.

Portability - although I don't generally worry about this in a scanner, I discovered the LiDE series while looking for a scanner I could on vacation to my parents to archive family photos. The size, weight and lack of external power supply make the LiDE excellent for such projects.

Scanner Software and Driver Rocks
Canon does an execellent job of their drivers. I have similar good experiences with their printer drivers - they generally never do something that leaves you wondering what happened or what to do next to get your task done. I did not install any of the bundled software because I already have other programs for my scanning projects.

Archiving DocumentsFirst I'll cover archiving documents. The scanner allows direct scan to PDF with no additional software. It has a couple excellent features for PDF scanning. One is the ability to scan a multipage document. So you can scan page after page and put it in the same document. It also supports PDF compression. The "high" setting creates documents as small as Acrobat 6.0's "Reduce File Size" command on the "File" menu - but without having to have Acrobat. Finally, it allows you to create indexed PDFs. Using these last two features together allows one to generate very small, searchable PDF copies of documents or books. I have been using it to scan old student year books for a project. I have been very impressed with how accurate the PDF indexing is on the old and sometimes wrinkled pages I am running through.

Scanning Photo Albums - the multi-crop feature is excellent if you have to scan photo albums of any type. TIP the automatic cropping detection only works with multiple photos on the glass - if the scanner cannot see the reflective back of the lid, it does not seem to do autocropping. TIP - you can manually put the scanner utility into "multi-crop" mode to create multiple files from multiple scan regions in one scan. Very handy for scanning photo albums - saves hours over what I was doing with my old HP scanner.

Paperless OfficeMany times I scan documents or forms that would require postal mail or faxing. Even if I have to fax a document, I scan to PDF so I have a copy. The scan to PDF feature is very handy for this - especially with the high compression setting which makes emailing a breeze.

This scanner is much smaller and more intelligent than the HP ScanJet it replaced.

Recommended:
Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 49
Interface: USB