Byline: Luke Peters.

Home scanners have traditionally been used for creating digital copies of photographs, but with digital cameras now outselling film models the need for a scanner to digitise photos isn't as big as it used to be.

Nevertheless, without a decent scanner you'll be stuck if you've got boxes full of negatives or old holiday snaps that you want to preserve digitally. Furthermore, with the price of flatbed scanners at an all-time low, there are some real bargains around. Indeed, not so long ago a transparency adapter would have been a luxury item, usually reserved for the higher-end devices. However, this has changed and all but two of the scanners on test here come with one as standard.

We asked six leading manufacturers to submit a budget model aimed at the home user who wants a versatile device that provides decent results. So let's see what your money gets you these days.

Canon Lide 35

The Lide 35 may be the smallest scanner on test here (its footprint isn't much bigger than an A4 piece of paper), but that doesn't detract from its scanning capabilities.

The setup is pretty simple; just load the software CD, choose what programs you want to install and away you go. There's no mains cable to attach as the scanner is powered solely through a USB port on your PC, and its small size means it won't take up too much desk space. It can even be put in an upright position with the aid of a stand.

The Lide 35 can scan up to 1,200 x 2,400ppi (pixels per inch) and has a 48bit colour depth. Scanning an A4 photo at 300ppi produced a crisp image with rich, vibrant colours and only took 26 seconds to complete. What's more, it only took 10 seconds to preview an image. Crank up the resolution, though, and you'll be in for a long wait. At 1,200ppi, it took five minutes to complete the scan.

Like all Canon Lide scanners, the 35 is built so that the entire scanning lid can be lifted up from the base when scanning large items. It's also got four shortcut buttons for creating either an image file, an email attachment, a regular scan or a copy. These can be reconfigured to generate a pdf document or send the image to an OCR (optical character recognition) program. Canon's Qare Level 2 dust and scratch removal technology is built in to improve the quality of scanned images.

There's no transparency adapter, but a collection of useful software packages is bundled with the scanner. At under £60, the Lide 35 is a great scanner for a cluttered desktop.

Epson 2480 Photo

Epson has been playing the imaging game for a long time, so it's no surprise that the 2480 Photo is a capable scanning device. What did surprise us, though, was that this 2,400ppi scanner has a built-in film adapter than can hold a strip of five negatives or two individual 35mm framed...