With flatbed scanners starting at around £50, a first reaction to Xerox's DocuMate 262 is to ask how the company can charge £599 + VAT for it. This is a different breed of machine from your average flatbed, though, and intended for a different purpose. It's a sheet-feed scanner, so it's ideal for sheets of paper or photos, and it can scan both sides of the sheet in one pass, known as duplex scanning. However, it can't scan books or other bound documents.

It's a small, neat machine, very solidly made, looking something like a small inkjet printer. With a plastic feed tray at the rear and another to receive scanned documents at the front, its desktop footprint is actually quite large and, although you can fold the feed tray forward when the scanner's not in use, the output tray takes up room unless your remove it altogether. If you site the DocuMate 262 permanently on a busy desk, it may get in the way.

Controls on the scanner are few and easy to understand. There are three buttons down the right-hand side of the top panel and a button at back-left to release the top cover, in case of paper jams. Two of the control buttons select simplex or duplex scanning and the third works in conjunction with a seven-segment LCD display.

This shows a number from 1 to 9 and refers to pre-defined settings for different scan types; paper or photo, text or image, black and white or colour. All these settings can be modified to your needs, which is just as well, since even on a fully UK version of Windows XP, they come in offering US Letter as the default paper size.

This is a fast scanner working through USB 2 and rated at 33 pages per minute (ppm). This doubles to 66ppm when scanning duplex. We scanned 10 mixed, simplex, A4 pages at 200dpi in 22 seconds, which is around 27ppm; a good result.

The scanner is supplied with copies of OmniPage Pro 12 and PaperPort Pro 9 Office, neither of which is the latest version, but both are big-selling pieces of productivity software. PaperPort works well and includes automatic OCR (optical character recognition) conversion to a variety of file formats, including Word and PDF. So does OmniPage Pro 12, but we couldn't get it to work satisfactorily using the DocuMate 262 as a WIA device, only with the TWAIN driver. For most practical purposes, using a TWAIN interface shouldn't be a problem.

This is a fast and effective scanner for single-sided or double-sided unbound sheets. For anybody with a workload that includes a lot of OCR or image archival, it could well be a worthwhile buy, but you pay a lot for the speed. £599 + VAT is quite an investment for a single-function device.