You can go through dozens of scanners and find that many of them carry all kinds of bells and whistles you don’t need—and, unfortunately, jack up the price. What you’re looking for is something simple: a few buttons wired to a scanner. Sound about right? The best home scanner in that case is the Canon CanoScan Lide 300.
Why We Like It – Canon CanoScan Lide 300
For the occasional document and photo scanning need, this flatbed scanner provides all the necessary functions necessary as an easy-to-use, budget option. But for mobile professionals, the best option is the scanner in reviewed in the Brother DS 620 lightweight compatible review.
- Good image quality for price
- Braindead easy to use
- Nice selection of bundled software
- Lack of mobile connectivity
- No automatic feeder
Performance
Starting with quality, the Canon CanoScan Lide 300 is packing some really good image quality. In most cases, having 2400×2400 DPI resolution is a bit overkill, but that increased quality helps to avoid pixelation if and when you need to crop and enlarge. For comparison, our top three entries all have a DPI resolution of 600, which is just a fraction of what the Lide 300 provides. It does not, however, have an automatic document feeder. It scans as fast as you can slide a new sheet in. On the other hand, you can click the Fujitsu scansnap ix1500 review to learn about a scanner that does fast 30ppm color scanning.
Design
Like any personal scanner, it needs to be small, compact, perhaps easily stored. This color image scanner happens to be both, though not quite as compact as a Doxie Go SE or Brother Mobile Color Page Scanner DS-620 and more in line with an Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300i in terms of size. With dimensions of 14.50 x 9.90 x 1.70 inches, you won’t have trouble finding space for it or storing it.
And we said it was easy to use, right? The Canon Lide 300 only has four buttons and a USB 2.0. No mobile functionality, which is a bummer, but you can set it up that your scans go directly to your preferred cloud service.
Value
The Canon CanoScan Lide 300 is outclassed by a large portion of our top scanners—so, why bother? Why, because of price. Point to any scanner on our list and the cheapest one is still $30 more than this. Performance might be marginally better compared to some, but it stands toe-to-toe with most. Then you have to consider the software that comes along such as the Auto Scan utility and IJ Scan utility; it comes bundled with good software that fills in most of its weaknesses. That, plus its performance and design, makes it a great budget option.
Canon CanoScan Lide 300 Wrap Up
Despite mobile support and an automatic feeder, the Canon CanoScan Lide 300 is a great budget scanner for personal use. It’s the kind of scanner you want when the need to scan arises, something that can be stored in a desk until called upon. It has good image quality, incredibly easy to use and the software bundled inside softens its weaknesses.
