If you are looking for speed rather than image quality, then look no further than the OneTouch 9000, because this thing is fast.

Using a USB 2.0 interface, it's a lot faster than any USB1.1 scanner and is almost as fast as some FireWire scanners. In contrast to its speed, though, the image quality is rather poor. When tested, colour photos took on a reddish cast both on screen and when printed. Also, when scanning monochrome photos, the scanner increased the contrast so that both highlights and shadows lacked depth in detail, although image quality improved when scanning line art.

Despite the OneTouch 9000 being capable of performing 48-bit colour scans and its driver being capable of passing these to an image editor, the bundled editor, ArcSoft PhotoImpression, can only handle 24-bit data, so you will need to install a third party editor such as Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop LE, or Ulead PhotoImpact to edit in raw 48-bit.

For ease of use the OneTouch 9000 comes with five quick start buttons. Although four of the buttons are preconfigured for scanning, copying/printing, e-mail and OCR, they are easily customised to whatever function you want.

The rest of the bundled software package isn't as fully featured as some but is still adequate for beginners or intermediate users. ScanSoft PaperPort Deluxe 7.0 includes ScanSoft's optical character recognition engine and automatically converts simple documents (such as typed pages) into editable text.

While the OneTouch 9000 is unquestionably fast its relatively poor image quality limits its use; it's not suitable for professional work.