A flatbed scanner for fifty notes? Seems rather unlikely, despite the recent drop in the price of these devices, from several hundred quid a couple of years ago to sub-£100 now. But fifty pounds for a scanner? Surely it would have to be made out of cardboard for that price.

So we thought when we found out about the Black Widow 4830 Pro. But we were pleasantly surprised to be proved wrong. Not only is this scanner not made out of cardboard, but the plastic and metal construction actually seems quite tough - certainly as strong as most other scanners in this increasingly competitive sector of the market. There were no strange rattling noises as we took the scanner out of its box, and it worked first time when plugged into our test PC's parallel port. Just in case you were wondering; yes, this scanner does have a second parallel port at the back, so that you can still use your printer while the scanner is connected.

After plugging it into the mains and installing the supplied driver software (which will work with Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0), we began testing the scanner's performance. Its optical resolution is 300 x 600 dots per inch (ignore 'interpolated' resolutions on scanner adverts - they're not a good guide to quality), with 24-bit colour depth, which equates to 16.7 million colours. Our three test images probably didn't have quite that many colours in them, but were sufficiently varied to test the scanner's ability to cope with different types of source image. It passed the test easily, producing good quality output that only required minor adjustment, using the supplied copy of Adobe PhotoDeluxe.

PhotoDeluxe is a nice piece of photo editing software, but if you were planning to use this scanner for document management tasks, you'll have a bit of a problem. The supplied copy of Textbridge OCR classic is good enough at recognising simple text, but quickly gets confused when shown columns, diagrams, or even slightly unusual typefaces. You'll have to budget for a decent OCR package if you have even slightly complex documents to scan. Perversely, that's likely to cost you more than the scanner itself.

If flatbed scanners get much cheaper than this, they'll be given away with packets of crisps. Surprisingly, there's really nothing wrong with this scanner, in terms of either build quality or scanning quality. So, if you're after a flatbed scanner for occasional use, it seems there's no need to pay more than fifty quid.