The dust-removal feature is supposed to help tone down scratches as well, but it didn't have much effect on them in our tests. The Twain driver has such welcome touches as color restoration that did a good job bringing color back to our faded test photo, dust removal that did a reasonable job of digitally removing dust specks from the scan, and backlight correction that brought out the details in the dark areas of a photo without losing details in the light areas. What earns the Canon LiDE 25 its very good rating for photos is not just the scan quality. Serious amateur photographers may find the quality marginal, but both of these issues were subtle enough that most people wouldn't notice them without having them pointed out. The scanner lost some details in bright areas, like the white–on-white detail in a wedding dress, and skin tones showed just a touch of posterization-changing suddenly where they should change gradually. In practice, photo-scan quality was easily good enough for reprinting and handing out as snapshots to friends and family. The LiDE 25's claimed maximum optical resolution of 1,200 pixels per inch (ppi) is more than enough, in theory, for scanning photos or text for OCR.

Even though it is a basic package, for general-purpose home scanning it does a good job. The software is limited to a scan-control utility and two bundled programs: a low-end photo editor and a special-edition (read: light-version) optical-character recognition program. The hardware is limited to basic flatbed scanning, without such extras as an automatic document feeder (ADF) or slide-scan capability.

Best Hosted Endpoint Protection and Security SoftwareĪs you might expect from a scanner that costs only $49.99 (direct), the Canon CanoScan LiDE 25 is a minimalist package.

Canon line 25