On first impression this is very much like the Hewlett Packard scanner. It's the same shape and pretty much exactly the same size, i.e. on the large-ish side. The only real aesthetic differences are that this model is half blue and half white, plus there are only three 'quick buttons' on the front, for the standard e-mail attach, copy and scan functions.

In terms of spec this is pretty impressive - the 4600 offers 1200 x 2400 dpi resolution scanning at up to 42-bit colour. It's a USB-only model, which is the way most scanners are going these days.

Packaged with the 4600 are a fair few pieces of software. There's the ScanWizard drivers, Recognita software for OCR, plus Caere OmniPage and Pagekeeper along with Ulead PhotoImpact 5 for image editing (one of the lesser known packages, but a good one) and Adobe PhotoDeluxe 2. This is another bundle which gets the thumbs up.

The ScanWizard driver software is very well designed. It has both basic and advanced modes, so the beginner can just pick from a basic list of scanning tools (which includes specifying the resolution depending on what is being scanned and some basic menus to modify colour, saturation and so forth). In advanced mode there's a host of customisable goodies including full brightness and colour correction, descreening and even filters to emboss, sharpen or blur the resulting scanned images. Top marks here.

And the image quality it produced was impressive. It was sharp with a minimum of noise, with the only real fault being the fact that the test scan was just a tad on the pale side, colour wise. Scanning speed wasn't too impressive, though, with the 4600 taking 110 seconds on average to complete the test.