It's the time of year, now that Summer is truly upon us, to get down to some serious scanning. Erm, actually, scratch that. If you've got a life it's time to go and sit out at the pub all afternoon or get down to Alton Towers or somewhere like that. If you're an IT journalist, however... those scanners are mighty tempting! Well, maybe not, but it's what we get paid to do.

Joking apart, the humble scanner is certainly one of the more interesting add-ons you can get for your PC. With a scanner you can archive your photo collection on your hard drive, turn your PC into a photocopier (provided you have a printer), get some real life clipart scanned in for your DTP software... its uses are many and varied.

And gone are the days when a scanner was a moderately expensive piece of equipment, fortunately, as you can now purchase one for well under a hundred notes. We've examined five models here and our price point is set at roughly the £70-£150 mark.

In other words, these are affordable, decent specification, flatbed scanners which could be used in the home or small office. We'll rate the scanners in terms of ease of use, price, speed and the resulting scanned image quality, as well as other more minor considerations.

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