It's not so long ago that flatbed scanners cost hundreds of pounds and were the preserve of design houses and individuals with plenty of cash lying about. More recently, however, the market has been flooded with cheap, yet capable, colour flatbed scanners, some costing as little as £50. It looks as though Canon has decided that if you can't beat them, you have to join them, and has launched its own low-cost scanner.

Low-cost is, in this case, a relative term. The CanoScan FB310 is not as cheap as some of its rivals, but is certainly one of the least expensive scanners that Canon has ever made. Inevitably, that means some sacrifices have been made, but fortunately not in the area of build quality, which is pretty high. Rather than connecting to a high-speed SCSI adapter, as is the case with more expensive scanners, the CanoScan FB310 uses the parallel port. There is an extra port at the rear of the scanner for the connection of a printer, which most users will require. Power is drawn from the mains via a two-pin lead.

Capable of scanning at a maximum resolution of 300 x 600dpi, which can be interpolated via software to 9,600 x 9,600dpi, the scanner can produce its output in black and white, 256-shade greyscale or 24-bit colour, which equates to 16.7 million colours. The actual colour scanning process occurs in 30-bit mode, to provide extra accuracy.

Physically smaller than some flatbed scanners, and larger than others, the CanoScan FB310 has a scanning area that's just slightly larger than A4, and has a removable lid that will be useful for scanning items such as pages from an open book. It is supplied with a TWAIN driver for Windows that allows any compliant application to import scanned images. If you don't already have such an application, the copy of U-Lead iPhoto Express is a competent enough image editing package, while Caere Omnipage LE will suffice for basic OCR work. For more advanced document recognition, however, a more professional software package will be essential.

This scanner's output quality is undoubtedly good, as is its build quality. But the CanoScan FB310 is more expensive than some of its competitors and the bundled OCR package is not much use for serious work.