An almost perfect lid(l)e helper

Introduction

One evening starting up the machines I almost immediately noticed something was amiss. I couldn't quite lay my finger on it until it dawned : the familiar green light blinking on the scanner wasn't there.

I checked the current which was there and suspected the power adapter to be faulty. But no, not even a replacement adapter managed to revive the poor thing. And that was the last for my Acer Vuego Brisa (Prisa) 310S SCSI scanner I owned for some six years and which I reviewed here on Epinions a long time ago. It wasn't at all a cheap scanner, at roughly 150 dollars (without the SCSI adapter card !) it was even quite an expensive buy that over the years didn't seem to have contributed as much as it should have to my productivity. But not more than two days after the incident I needed an urgent copy of a document and, you guessed it, the scanner was already sorely missed.

I even felt silly having to turn to a nearby copy center for the few copies I needed, so my mind was soon made up to look for a replacement scanner. Therefore I started browsing the site of my favorite online hardware vendor and then looked up comments on his offerings on Epinions and similar reviewer sites.

As I was very pleased with the i850 Canon bublejet printer I bought in the beginning of last year and as so happens my dealer had many Canon scanners on offer I decided to stay with the brand.

Looking back at the average to low use I made of my Acer scanner and not wanting to have to weigh off against each other the 10 (!) diferent Canon scanners that were there, I finally decided to go for the cheapest model they had on offer and that was of course the Lide20 I now will be reviewing.

What is it ?

The Canon CanoScan Lide20 scanner is a flatbed scanner, which means that you have still have to expose the documents you want to store on your computer on the scanner's glass plate and not feed it through it like you would in a faxmachine or a photocopier, or even one of those multipurpose all-into-one devices you now find everywhere.

-so remember : no automatic paper feed !

It is even rather tiny, which makes it just a tad bigger than a paper sheet and about one inch thick. Which is nice of course.

It also has some nifty features :

"Advanced Z-lid"

This means that without having to remove the lid you still can scan items like a page in a thick book, and you don't have to tear the page out, the lid simply hinges high enough for the book to be put between it and the glass exposure plate.

Upright Scanning

That's right, the LiDe20 comes with a stand which allows you to put it up on its side, allowing to save some deskspace. However in this position you can forget about scanning the bulky items mentionned above. For scanning loose pages this feature does work, but be quick to close the lid otherwise the page or picture follows the laws of gravity and tries to slide out.


Three EZ (= easy) Access Buttons

On the frontside of the scanner are three quick access buttons allowing you to immediately activate the device for a quick scan, making a digital copy or scanning directly to e-mail.


Canon's Fast Multi-Photo Mode

Which translates into the possibility of scanning several photos in only one go and the Canon software will separate them for you and automatically straighten scewed photos.


Technical specifications

What distinguishes the different LiDE models (there is this LiDE20 and also 30, 50 and 80) offered by Canon, which all look more or less alike, is their optical resolution.

- For this LiDE20 the optical (real resolution) is 600x1200 dots per inch (dpi) although through software this can be raised to a theoretical 9600 dpi.

- The scanner has 48-bit input (this relates to the number of colors the device can see) but only 24-bit output.

- It is a USB device, which means you plug it into a USB port on your PC. As it isn't stated anywhere on the package I can safely assume that is only a USB 1.1 device and therefore cannot use the USB2 speeds. Here I have to stress once again that all USB 1.1 devices can be used with USB 2.0 hardware and vice versa. Of course the final speed will be limited by the slowest device in the chain.

- Canon assures that the scanner can be used with both the Microsoft Windows operating systems (XP/2000/Millenium/98) and Apple's MacOS 9 and X. I have installed it on a Windows XP Professional system.

The whole of the system requirements are: a computer with 150 MHz or higher processor (CPU), USB port (excluding add on USB port), CD ROM drive (x2 or faster), Display: 65,000 or more colours, 800 x 600 or more pixels, RAM 64MB or more (128 MB or more for Win XP)

For Mac OS: Mac OS 9.0 or above / OS X v10.1 or above, Mac with USB support, Display: 32,000 or more colours, CPU: PowerPC G3 or higher, RAM: 64MB or more (OS X requires 128MB or more)

- Speeds according to Canon themselves :
° Preview speed is Approx. 15 sec (excluding processing time)
° Colour scanning speed 16 msec/line (600 dpi) and Black and White 5.3 msec/line (600 dpi)

From rest it does take the Lide20 some time to jump into action.

But Power consumption is really low with 2.5W Operation power and 1.25W Standby power.


The Package

The scanner comes in a carton box which besides the machine itself contains two manuals (fullblown paper manuals tend to be rare these days), each covering a number of languages, a USB-cable and two CDs containing the software. Now I hear some of you ask : Wot ? No power adapter ? Yes, that's right it doesn't need one as it takes its power through the USB-bus so there is only the USB-cable needed for it to work : Lovely !

The two CD's are almost identical except that one contains the English, French and Spanish versions of the setup software and the other contains the Dutch, Italian and Greek setup software, mine came in its version 1.04.

So besides the driver, which makes sure that your operating system recognizes the device and installs it correctly there is some other sofware.
- Scangear CS -
- CanoSCan Toolbox - containing the utilities to configure and tune the scanner
- ArcSoft PhotoStudio 5 - a slimline image editor, which allows you to work over the images you scanned, resizing them or tuning them a bit, of course not to be compared with the major wellknown suites like Adobe PhotoShop or Jasc Paintshop pro
- ArcSoft PhotoBase - a lightweight image suite, mainly allowing you to manage, bundle and store the images you scan
- Scansoft Omnipage SE - a basic version of the Omnipage OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software needed to convert a scanned textdocument, which is in fact initially just an image to your PC, into a textfile you can use, edit, modify or copy and paste into your own documents

and, finally, the Adobe Acrobat Reader which you need to read the manuals stored on the CDs in the PDF-format you now find everywhere (saves people without broadband connection the hefty but free download from the Adobe website)

Here I have to note one weird thing I encountered while trying to install the Omnipage SE software ; the installation couldn't finalize because the setup routine complained it couldn't find a file which after checking was indeed on the CD. I solved this by copying the whole Omnipage directory from the Canon CD onto my harddrive and then launching the setup procedure from there, only then all went well.

Make sure to install the Canon software before connecting the scanner to your PC, if not you'll be sure for the installation to go wrong. So the right order of doing things is to put the software CD with contains the language of your choice in your CD-player, launch the setup procedure from it, install the driver, the utilities and the software you think you will be needing. Then restart your computer and plug in the scanner in a free USB-port. After the (Windows) logon procedure your scanner is ready for use.


The Final Verdict

Becoming more and more of a Canonfan by the day, I must say I like this device, not only its size, the fact that it has only one cable and no more power adapter taking up one of my wall sockets, but also because I wonder how on earth for such a small price they can deliver such a package. With the scanner, USB-cable and the necessary software to do basic scanning and editing of both text and images. And then they still even throw in a decent manual in 16 languages. And the Lide20 even looks good too, with its darkblue cover and grey body,not at all out of place in any modern office.

Obviously for the price you can't expect Canon to include the full Adobe Photoshop Suite for the image editing or even OmnipagePro for the OCR but the software they do provide you with allows you to get started on whatever scannning job you fancy.

The sole drawback I discovered to this date is that six years further down the line this LiDE20 is not faster than my Acer 310S was, but here you have to keep in mind that it only costs one third of the price I paid for the now deceased 310S and did I forget to mention that the Acer was one of the fastest SCSI-scanners of its time ? On the other hand the litle Lide20 also has the advantage of being much quieter while scanning than the Acer was when it was still in good working order.