Best Canon Scanners

If you have a home office, you need a scanner. You just do. Heck, even if you don't have a home office, you could probably do with a scanner. Not only do they come in pretty handy if you need to get your photos or other documents online -- they even function as a photo copier, which is why I have mine.

Oh, I used to have one of those great big All-In-One pieces of crap. (Made by HP, if you really want to know.) And it was more headache than help, let me tell you. It took forever to print anything, and it cost a small fortune to replace the ink.

Well, that All-In-One broke, eventually. First went the printer, but the scanner was still usable. Not *easily* mind; I didn't use that headache line for nothing. But it worked. A bit longer, anyway. And then it went to scanner heaven, along with the rest of it. I had already gone out and replaced it with a lovely laser-jet printer, so I knew I wasn't going to waste more money on another all in one piece of crap. But I didn't want to buy a photocopier either. (My God, have you seen how much those things cost?)

So I got clever and bought the next best thing: A Scanner. And boy, are they affordable these days. Don't worry about quality, either -- just cos they're cheap, doesn't mean they're crap. No, indeedy. I have the first one on this list, and I cannot sing the praises loud enough. If you want a cheap home office that won't let you down, you want to make a Canon scanner a part of it.

I cannot tell you how much I love my Canon Lide 25. It is the most fabulous, coolest, hippest little scanner I have ever seen. I have a Mac, and installation took all of 5 minutes. Once it was ready to go, just popped my book on there, hit scan, and voila!

You have 3 buttons to choose from: Scan (to computer, obviously), print (directly to printer, which is what makes this a virtual photo copier), and email. I love, love, love this baby, and I highly recommend it to anyone who doesn't want to spend a fortune.

Price: $42

The Canon Lide 90 is pretty much the same thing as the Canon Lide 25, except it's twice as much money. Oh.. there are a few minor differences, but I'm not sure you need them. For example, this one has 4 buttons, instead of 3. They're all the same, apart from the extra, which automatically creates PDF files.

PDF files are nifty, of course, but you can create them easily enough with the Lide 25. Of course, I'm sure there are other aspects which make it cost more, I'm just not sure what they could be.

Price: $80

This one is far more expensive than the Lide 25, but it actually appears to be that much more advanced. For starters, this thing can sit upright on your desk. Now, if you have loads of space, this won't matter. But, if you have a cluttered mess in front of you, this could be rather helpful. It also has 7 buttons (compared to 3 and 4 on the previous models) and can make multi-page PDFs.

Price: $140

The Cannon 4400 F also appears to have 7 buttons that do all kinds of magical things -- but this one costs considerably less than the previous model. I'm not sure why that would be, but that's how it is. The 4400 F scans 35 mm slides and has a 48-bit color depth. They say there are 281 trillion color possibilities. Wowzers... that's a lot of color, eh?

Price: $85