When Canon first introduced its LIDE flatbed scanners, they were the only devices on the market to be USB powered and ultra-slim. Then Xerox brought out its 7400 model, with a similar design to the LIDE. Now the Xerox 7600 is the latest in the range and is being marketed as a photo scanner for the SOHO market.

This doesn't really match what the 7600 is. It's a slim, A4 flatbed scanner, without a backlight in the lid and with a maximum optical resolution of 1,200ppi. This means there's no way you can use it to scan transparencies or photo negatives, which need a higher resolution and illumination from behind. That just leaves photographic prints, and while the scanner is quite capable of scanning these, so is just about every other scanner sold for use in the home.

What you actually have in the Xerox 7600 is a general-purpose document and print scanner, which is easy to set up as it needs no external power. It draws everything it needs from its single USB connection, though this is rather oddly positioned at the front end of the scanner's right-hand side. Since one of the main advantages of the 7600 is its single cable, why not make the most of it and connect it at the rear?

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The design of the scanner is sleek, with a double-hinged lid at the back that can cope with books up to a couple of centimetres thick and a neat cut-out in the lid at the front, making room for five function buttons, labelled E-mail, Copy, Scan, Archive and Photo.

Although branded Xerox, the scanner actually comes from Visioneer, which has an agreement to use the Xerox label. Consequently it can use its OneTouch technology to make it particularly easy to scan to a variety of destinations. Press any of the scanner buttons and the related application is called up on the PC to receive the scan.

The 7600 uses a Contact Image Sensor (CIS) with a 48-bit colour depth, so can handle colour photos and comes with both Nuance PaperPort 11 SE, which includes OCR, and ArcSoft's Scrapbook Suite, which includes PhotoImpression 5.

Scanning a single A4 black text page at 300dpi took 22 seconds, while scanning a 15 x 10cm colour print at 600dpi took 50 seconds. Neither of these times is particularly impressive. Output quality is fair, though by default there's a noticeable blue cast to colour photo scans. This can be compensated for through software, but that's another operation.

This is a neat and effective scanner, with a good software bundle to support it. As a general-purpose scanner for home and small office, it's quick enough, has reasonable resolution and saves power, compared with most externally powered scanners. It's not especially good at scanning photos, though, so it's hard to see why Visioneer is pushing this function.