This is a long, silver and grey scanner with a series of seven software-control buttons along its front edge. These offer functions such as scan-to-Web, OCR and e-mail, as well as one-touch scan. There's even a custom button, which you can assign to a program of your choice.

Install the ScanWizard 5 software, connect the scanner's power supply and its USB cable and you're all set. The software offers two operating modes, one for beginners, where nearly all settings are adjusted automatically, and a second for experts, offering several separate dialogues and far more scope for manual settings.

Alone among the scanners reviewed here, the ScanMaker 4900 works with the older USB 1.1 standard. Partly due to this and partly due to a lot of automatic adjustments before each scan, the scan times on our test documents were not good. 43 seconds for a simple mono page scan could be irritatingly long if you need to OCR a multi-page document.

The scanner comes bundled with a useful set of software, including Adobe Photoshop LE and Ulead's DVD Picture Show, both of which can do a lot more than simply saving your scans.

Scan quality was variable, at least at default settings, with vivid colours coming out pale and insipid. Strangely, the preview scans in the ScanWizard 5 software looked considerably better than the final results in our selected application. You can compensate for these problems fairly easily, but many people simply want to scan, using their scanner straight from the box. Even with this shortcoming, though, the ScanMaker 4900 is good value at its price.