When all-in-ones (AIOs) first started taking over from single-function inkjets in a big way several years ago, a lot of people predicted that flatbed scanners for home use would fade away. Instead, scanners have held their own, mostly by upping resolution in new models and adding the ability to scan film. The Canon CanoScan LiDE 100 ($59.99 direct) follows a different strategy, delivering reasonably high-quality photo scans at a budget price. If you need a standalone scanner for photos and don't need to scan film, the LiDE 100 is an all but irresistible bargain, making it a clear Editors' Choice for a budget scanner.

As is true of any flatbed scanner, the LiDE 100 is theoretically suitable for all-purpose use. The software it comes with focuses primarily on photos, however, which effectively makes it a photo scanner unless you buy (or already have) additional programs. In that context, the 2,400-pixel-per-inch (ppi) optical resolution is overkill—far beyond anything you need for scanning photos, unless you plan to enlarge a small part of a photo.

Aside from Twain and WIA drivers, which will let the scanner work with almost any Windows software that includes a scan command, the only programs bundled with the LiDE 100 are ArcSoft Photo Studio 5.5 and Canon's MP Navigator EX scan utility. MP Navigator EX includes an optical character recognition (OCR) feature that can turn a scanned text document into a searchable PDF file, but it's well short of a full-featured OCR program. The utility's main purpose is to scan and send the results to various destinations ranging from files to e-mail attachments. It also offers its own set of photo-related features for enhancing scanned photos.

Setting up the LiDE 100 is easy: Install the software, and plug in the USB cable that comes with the scanner. You don't even need to plug in a power cord, since the scanner gets power over the USB cable. I installed the scanner on a Windows XP system. According to Canon, the installation disc also includes drivers and a full set of software for Vista, Windows 2000, and Mac OS 10.3.9 through 10.5.x.

Using the scanner is almost as easy as setting it up, with several options for giving a scan command. The obvious choice is to press one of the four buttons on the front panel: Copy, Email, PDF, or Scan. You can also choose from a similar set of options in one of the MP Navigator EX screens, or you can manually choose a document type (color photo, black-and-white photo, color document, black-and-white document, magazine, or text), optionally change the resolution or other settings, and then start the scan.

By default, the scan is fully automatic, not even stopping to show a preview. If you want some control over the settings, however, a check box lets you tell the utility to launch the Twain driver so you can preview and adjust settings before the actual scan. The driver itself lets you choose between scanning in Fully Automatic mode—equivalent to a point-and-shoot mode in a camera—Basic mode with just a few options, or an Advanced mode that lets you control such settings as black point, white point, saturation, and color balance.

The driver also provides several digital enhancement options that make it easy to improve on the original. A color restore feature, for example, did a good job on my tests of reviving colors in faded photos. Similarly, a dust and scratch removal feature did a reasonably good job of removing dust specks. The feature doesn't do much for scratches, but that's expected. If you need scratch removal that really works, you need to invest in a much-more-expensive scanner with hardware-based Digital ICE.

Probably the most impressive enhancement feature in the driver is its backlight correction, a convenience that Canon scan drivers have offered for some time. Take an indoor picture of a person standing in front of a window, for example, and the face may come out as a dark silhouette against a bright background. With backlight correction, you can bring out the details in the foreground simply by turning the feature on.

Count these digital enhancements as welcome extras on top of reasonably impressive raw scan quality. I've seen better quality from more-expensive scanners, including the Canon CanoScan 8800F for example, but not from anything near the LiDE 100's price. The differences between the original photos and scanned versions printed on an Epson PictureMate printer were minimal. Few people short of a professional photographer would complain about the difference.

The scanner's speed is less impressive than the scan quality. I'd describe it as pokey but tolerable. Prescans took about 19 seconds, and scanning 4-by-6s at 300 ppi took about 33 seconds. Scanning the same images at 400 ppi took about 53 seconds. By comparison, the 8800F takes 8 to 12 seconds for a scan. On the plus side, the LiDE 100 delivers a consistent speed at any given resolution, since it never has to wait for its LED light source to warm up.

You can, of course, use the LiDE 100 for the occasional office task as well. The lack of an automatic document feeder (ADF) makes scanning multipage documents a chore, but it can be done. The OCR feature isn't anything to write home about, but it managed to read both Times New Roman and Arial fonts at sizes as small as 10 points on my tests without a mistake. Similarly, the ability to save files directly to searchable PDF format provides some limited document management capability, although without an indexing program or a document management program, the key word is limited.

The LiDE's lack of office-centric features and software makes it the wrong choice for most home offices, and the lack of a film scan feature makes it an even worse choice for anyone interested in scanning film. But if you don't need those features, there's no good reason to spend extra money to buy a scanner that has them.

If you're interested primarily in scanning photographic prints—converting, say, old photos into digital format before they fade away—the LiDE 100 offers an inexpensive way to scan at reasonably high quality. Even better, its digital enhancement features will let you improve on the originals in many cases with very little time or effort. That's more than enough to make the LiDE 100 an attractive package and a great value for the price.

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