Scanners are used for making digital copies of paper documents--most commonly photos, but sometimes texts to be edited or negatives or films.  As always, though, there's a big difference in quality from one model to the next.  The scanners we've tested so far already show variations in size, speed and accuracy.

Today, multifunction printers always include a scanner.  So why look for one elsewhere?  A standalone scanner costs at least £100--or the same price as a multifunction printer.  Well, as we mentioned above, it's all about how fast and how well it can digistise documents and photos, and about the extra options like negative scanning.

Expensive = Better?  Not necessarily ...

In terms of the different ranges available, below £100, you're looking at scanners for home users so you can't expect excellent quality, although we have found some excellent surprises.

Beyond that, we move into the professional domain, and at £300 and above, you find products aimed at photographers and graphic designers.  The needs of personal and professional users are not necessarily the same.

In general, what the average consumer needs a scanner that's not too big, fast at performing a quick prescan and then capable of producing decent quality scans at 76/96 dpi (for web graphics), 300 dpi (to reproduce photos full-size) and 600 dpi (to enlarge photos 4x).  For all of these tasks, the scanner in a multifunction printer will often suffice.  Have a look at our multifunction printer tests: the inset on the right of each one will tell you how good they are at scanning.

Professionals, on the other hand, place less emphasis on speed, and are more demanding about the quality of their scans.  They need the most accurate colours possible and  the minimum of automatic retouching to produce faithful representations of their original.

That, at least, is the theory.  In practice, we found things to be a lot more complicated, and even discovered one entry-level scanner that produced better results than professional models.  But let's not get ahead of ourselves: our collection of scanner product tests will soon grow. For the time being, though, we have a handful of entry-level options, and we'll be looking at some 'professional' models soon ...