While the IT industry has made a virtue of producing ever more efficient all-in-one printers to appeal particularly to those on a tight budget, there will still always be a need in busy offices for a dedicated scanner that can capture, store and distribute photos and documents as the need arises.

HP's latest Scanjet N6310 has been designed to be versatile and speedy and even to be left to its own devices while you go off and tackle that urgent business meeting. Measuring a broad 502 x 415 x 162mm and weighing 6.7kg, the N6310 is styled in no-nonsense black and off-white and comes with an automatic document feeder with 50-sheet capacity. This flatbed scanner can also handle bound or stapled documents, as well as business cards, photos and legal size documents.

Functioning at a top resolution of 2400 x 2400dpi, the N6310 connects to your PC via a standard USB 2.0 cable and has a built-in Transparent Materials Adapter under the cover that can accommodate two 35mm slides or three 35mm negative frames. In practice it's quite fiddly to remove and replace the negative strip holder as it's positioned close to the edge of the cover's downward curve.

Get the latest Dell Coupons and other computer coupons at CheapStingyBargains.com.

The controls on the front are clear and simple: a preference settings tool with LCD to guide you through, buttons for scanning, copying and cancelling and an alarm LED. You can also set all the parameters via the excellent supplied HP Scanning software, where you can cue up and store commands according to priority (e.g. document to PDF, TIFF, e-mail or printer and negatives to JPG file), edit photos using crop, resize and rotate options and even choose colour-drop-out to improve OCR accuracy.

Start-up is pretty fast (around 6 seconds) and that swiftness of attitude is echoed when it comes to scanning individual photos, text documents and slides. The maximum claimed speed is 15ppm for documents and we averaged 12ppm comfortably (6ipm with A4 colour photos). We were especially impressed with the quality of the colour reproductions, which were vibrant, detailed and accurate.

It was a different story, at least in speed terms, when using the 50-sheet ADF: our 20-sheet text-with-diagrams document took a good 12 minutes, so it's probably a good idea to make a cup of coffee when you use this feature. Again, however, the high standard of reproduction made it worth the wait and you do have duplex capability.

Mac users will be delighted to hear that they have a separate installation disk which includes Readiris Pro OCR software and Presto! PageManager, while PC users have Readiris Pro plus PaperPort (to share scanned images) and Presto! BizCard to help organise all your business contacts.

A versatile, high quality and economical flatbed document scanner with simple controls, programmable shortcuts and an excellent range of software.