Think flatbed scanners and you’re probably thinking big bulky things that take up over half your desk space. This certainly isn’t true of the new CanoScan LiDE 500F, which is convenience personified (well, machinified). Using an LED light source, rather than the usual CCF (Cold Cathode Fluorescent) lamps found in most scanners, the 500F is amazingly slim at just 35mm. To further reduce the size it takes up, a folding foot enables you to stand the scanner on its side and use it in an almost vertical position.

The reduction in power consumption offered by its LED technology also means that the 500F can take all the current it needs directly from the host PC’s USB port, so there’s no need for a separate power supply. This makes it ideal for portable use with laptops, and it’s just as easy to unplug the scanner from a desktop PC and file it away in a bookcase when not in use.

For ease of use, a new version of Canon’s TWAIN driver makes ‘Simple’ mode an absolute breeze, while the ‘Advanced’ mode gives access to a wide range of colour, tone and image correction settings, plus the excellent new ‘FARE Level 3’ system for dust and small scratch removal in scanning film.

With a generous maximum optical resolution of 2,400x4,800dpi, photo scanning is nice and sharp, even without using the Unsharp Mask facility. Colour rendition and tonal separation prove equally good throughout scanning of our test photos. Indeed, the overall reflective scan quality is more than a match for most conventional CCF scanners on the market.

Speed performance is good. In our tests, the 500F returned times of 10 seconds for both a full platen preview and a 300dpi scan of a 6x4.5in photo. Mono scanning took 15 seconds for an A4 text document, and a 35mm transparency at 1,200dpi took a particularly impressive 22 seconds. However, the overall transparency scanning quality isn’t quite up to the standard of Epson’s current Perfection scanners, and you can’t scan mounted slides – only individual film frames or strips of 35mm film.

Accompanying software includes ArcSoft PhotoStudio for digital image editing and the ScanSoft OmniPage OCR program, the latter being particularly good. Overall, the 500F is expensive for an LED scanner but the scanning quality is great and it’s arguably the most user-friendly scanner on the market.