Out of all the scanners on review here, this is the most aesthetically appealing of the bunch. Its sleekly designed, silver on grey lines just scream "luxury" at you. If this were a car it would be a top of the range Lexus with satellite TV and one of those onboard computers that drives the car for you whilst brewing up a cuppa.

Lest we get carried away here, of course, it's actually a scanner... but a very thin, lightweight, small footprint affair. It's slightly bigger than an A4 sheet of paper and an inch high; in other words, extremely compact. Also noteworthy is the lack of a power lead - it runs purely off the PC's power via the USB cable - and the Z-lid, a folding scanner lid which allows you to scan thick material. It's not as clumsy as the traditional lift-up-and-off lids that all the other scanners employ.

Bundled with the CanoScan N1220U is a copy of Adobe Photoshop 5.0LE along with Arcsoft Studio 2000 (an image editor with plentiful support for digital cameras), Photobase (image management) and Caere OmniPage Pro for OCR.

Of course there's also the Scangear driver software, which can be activated by acquiring TWAIN through an application or by pressing the one solitary 'quick button' on the front of the scanner. The Scangear software has both basic and advanced modes of operation. In the basic mode it's generally easy to use although one element, the magazine scan option, might be a tad confusing for a novice. With the advanced mode you can modify the brightness and contrast of the scan and there are a couple of extra filters for descreening and the like. There's not too much room to manoeuvre but then again the software is very functional.

In terms of scan quality the N1220U was a real winner. The scan quality was simply superb with great colour balance and tone. It did produce the longest scan time at 118 seconds, but the results really are worth the wait. This is a superb scanner in the design and quality stakes.