Getting documents into the digital domain used to be hard work and not exactly reliable but its now widely accepted that most businesses have a scanner or photocopier that can take colour scans of documents and photos, but can you get affordable easy to operate kit for the home?

The first stage of any purchase is to work out what you are going to use the kit for, in this case the scanner is for getting images onto the web, this site in fact!  so this automatically drives the resolution needed, in short what quality of scan do you want. For most web work 1200 x 600 is fine as images on websites have to be optimised sp that pages don't take too long to load.

However as you go up the scale for resolution you increase the cost as the optical components of the scanners cost more, some scanners offer increased resolution through software by making multiple passes of the document, this can be useful but if you need a high resolution you should not rely on this.

So if you are in the market for a web scanner we at lordpercy.com have been looking at the Canon Lide20, this is very much an entry level scanner but does cheap mean poor? From our tests that's certainly not the case, the fall in consumer electronics prices has in effect bought a 600 x 1220 dpi scanner down to sub £50.

The Lide 20 measures just 256 x 383 x 34 mm and is a deep blue in colour, it is remarkably light yet build quality seems good for the price, it both connects to and is powered from the PC via USB, the supplied software includes both the drivers for the scanner and a package scansoft omnipage. However we found that the supplied software was a little basic and its best to scan direct from a package like Photoshop if you have access to it.

The canon is quick and remarkably quiet its "Z lid" allows you to scan bulky books easily and you can mount it on its side if you are really pushed for space although we weren't that impressed for the supplied attachment for doing this.

The scans were of good quality for the 600 x 1220 resolution and more than adequate for the web work we need, in=mages were crisp and colour reproduction good. Canon also have a full range which can offer much higher DPI figures but with an increasing price, all round then this is a value for money product £50 for a scanner its hard to beat!

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