As you might have gathered, I like meddling in digital photography. There are however a number of printed foto’s from before I had my digital camera (not to mention the things our daughter will draw someday) which I would like to digitize. Unfortunately, the HP scanjet 4P which I used before has only got an SCSI interface and I use laptops these days. So I set out to look for a cheap scanner with USB access. After comparing websites and stores, I stumbled upon the Canon CanoScan Lide 25. For about €50 this scanner offers everything the occasional user needs. It’s very slim (about 1 cm), about as large as a sheet of paper, uses leds instead of fluorescent light and it can be powered from the USB port, so there is no need for an external power adapter. This is especially handy when using a laptop. On the downside, it’s not very fast and the quality is limited when scanning in high resolution.
- prescan takes 16 seconds
- 10×15 photo at 150 dpi takes 20 seconds
- 10×15 photo at 300 dpi takes 38 seconds
- 10×15 photo at 1200 dpi takes 2 and a half minutes
To illustrate the quality I scanned a picture and then made a picture of the original with the Canon eos 350D with EF-S 60 macro lens.
The full face in original size: (100 dpi)
The Canoscan Lide (600 dpi) (right eye)
The Canon eos digital camera: (left eye)
