Review on Canon 0307B001 CanoScan Color Scanner by Aravind Joshi

This scanner offers incredible value for money. Setup is easy and performance is excellent. If you only scan a few documents a day, look no further. On the other hand, despite being a USB 2.0 device, it's a bit slow. An 8.5 x 11 grayscale scan at 300 dpi took 30 seconds, then another 15 seconds to return to the starting point for the next scan. The rest of this review describes my installation experience. the box is very thin. The device has clear written warnings about installing software before connecting it to a computer. Also glued to the device is a user-friendly prompt to unlock the mechanism. In my habit, when installing the driver, I did not use the CD, but downloaded it from the support site. Everything went smoothly. Since my system is running XP I prepared to install the driver described as XP driver but the readme file said it doesn't work with Canoscan Toolbox so I used the Vista driver (ScanGear CS) instead Installed; this worked fine on XP. Scanning and copying required no additional setup. The buttons worked fine. Then I downloaded Nuance Scansoft Omnipage SE optical character recognition software. I used the CD as it wasn't on the website. Again, the process was painless. I scanned a page from a book; he recognized everything perfectly and without error. I scanned a thermally printed credit card receipt from a restaurant. Surprisingly, he also recognized this almost perfectly. I assigned OCR to one of the scanner buttons. I did this by simply dragging the button icon onto the OCR icon on the computer screen. I plan to use it for documents, not photos, so I haven't tried the color options.