Canon CanoScan N650U > Reviews (24)

I need good scanning facilities – it is fundamental to the running of my life. I need to scan documents, photos and anything else I can fit under the lid of the scanner. Sadly a short while ago my scanner broke down and so I searched for a new one.

I finally found this scanner for a very good price (around £65 from Jungle I think), and so decided to buy it and see if it would do the job. I was impressed – I bought a Canon branded product, as I know from past experience that with devices such as optical peripherals the branded items are usually the best. I was impressed when I first tried it out.

It is a USB product (although there is a similar product available with a parallel connection), and plugs straight into the PC and is nearly ready to go. The supplied software is very easy and quick to install, and the scanner is ready to use straight away (with just one restart). It comes with photo editing software that is surprisingly good considering it is given away in the package. It also has the standard TWAIN drivers necessary for scans to be made in any application.

The supplied OCR software is OmniPage Pro 9.0. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is, if you don’t know, a way of recognising the text of a document and allow editing rather than treat it as a graphic. The packaged software, in conjunction with this scanner, has done an excellent job on all the documents I have used it on. It even gets badly printed documents in small print 100% correct. It should be noted that it only works on printed documents, and is hopeless on handwriting.

The drivers supplied with the scanner allow for a very wide range of adjustments to be made at the time of scan. Even though there are very technical adjustments possible (including Colour/Tone Histograms and graphs for accurate colour correction), it is still very simple to use, and very easy just to do a basic scan. There are also many preset adjustments for many types of documents, and also an Auto-Adjust feature, which usually does a pretty good job of adjusting brightness, etc. to make an accurate scan.

The actual quality and speed of scan itself is impressive. The preview is completed very quickly, and the scan time is excellent. I was genuinely impressed the quality of the scans too. It is possible to scan to great enough detail to see the colour separations and pixels on professionally, print-house documents/brochures! This, I decided, was just about enough detail to satisfy me. It also allows for adjustment powerful enough to enhance dull or poor quality originals.

Physically, the scanner is very thin indeed, and has a lid that will cleverly adjust to allow you to scan large or bulky items. It has a button on the front which can be programmed to automatically do a photocopy, fax, email, or image scan. Power is provided through the USB port of the computer so there is no need for any power cables – which is handy as it means I have an extra free socket. One other thing that does interest me is the strange colours the light goes on the scanner head (have a look if you have one) when scanning!

Overall, this is a good quality product at a very reasonable price, and I do recommend that anyone considering buying a new scanner take a look at it. I can’t see that anyone’s scanning needs are more than this provides, unless they are doing professional scanning, or need to scan 35mm/APS film.

Available from PC World, Dixons, Jungle.com, etc.