If the One Touch product name seems familiar to you but not associated with Xerox, then don't worry - your mind is not playing tricks on you. Visioneer has a trademark licensing agreement with Xerox to produce a line of Xerox-branded scanners for the home or small office.

And if you are familiar with the latest line of One Touch scanners from Visioneer then you will instantly recognise the layout and the stylish silver-and-black design of the 1,200 x 4,800dpi One Touch 4800TA. The one thing that does grab you about this scanner is just how slim it is, with a height of just 66mm. Being just 432mm long and 216mm wide, it doesn't take up much desktop space either.

The lid hinges along the longest side of the unit, which is useful if you are scanning from bulky items such as books and magazines. Built into the lid is a film holder enabling you to scan 35mm slides and negatives using the built-in backlight.

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Using a combination of a USB 2.0 interface and a neat bit of technology, it certainly scans quickly enough. Instead of the usual two complete passes to produce an auto-cropped scan, the One Touch 4800TA uses something called FlashBack Bi-directional Autoscan, which does everything in one pass. With this function enabled the scanner previews the image in one direction, cropping the edges of the image before reversing back to perform the final high resolution scan.

Arranged in a panel on the front of the scanner are the five One Touch buttons, four of which are pre-configured for sending the scanned image straight to the PC for editing (via PaperPort), OCR for any text work, e-mail or straight to a printer. The fifth button is user-configurable to send the image to any appropriate application.

While the scanner may be fast, the image quality varies. Scanning an A4 page resulted in an image that faithfully reproduced colours and had a good level of detail. On the other hand, scans of a 6 x 4-inch colour photo and colour negative were dark with an orange tint, and the scan of a black-and-white test photo lacked definition, particularly when compared to the output from some of the opposition against which the One Touch 4800TA is pitched.

Bundled with the One Touch 4800TA are ScanSoft's PaperPort Deluxe 8 - which includes TextBridge, PaperPort's own OCR tool - and a copy of Ulead PhotoExpress to manipulate your scanned images.

Overall, Xerox's One Touch 4800TA is a little disappointing. While it may be fast, the images produced are of variable quality, but it does come bundled with some useful software.