The quality of the scanners you can now buy for under £150 is surprising. We're close to having reached optimum optical and interpolated resolutions and colour depth, so most manufacturers are looking to improvements in feature sets to win your money.

Many scanners, even in this price range, now include transparency adapters and one-touch buttons to simplify common tasks. In this group, depending on make and model, you get from three to eight software-controlled buttons for things like scanning, copying and e-mailing.

All bar the Microtek ScanMaker 4900 include transparency adapters, usually built into the scanners' lids, and these all worked to produce reasonable, high-resolution scans from slides. The Microtek scanner has an optional transparency adapter costing extra.

If your budget is tight, you could do a lot worse than go for Canon's very able CanoScan 3000F. This neat, well-designed scanner incorporates most of the features of its rivals, but scans quickly and produces results nearly good enough to use without tweaking. It also includes a good software bundle, with lesser-known but useful photo editing and image organisation software.

If you can run to the extra cost, though, Epson's Perfection 1660 Photo produced superior scan quality and needed little adjustment for full-colour print or transparency scans straight from the box. Like the Canon, it integrates the transparency adapter into its lid, which makes it very easy to switch from print to slide or negative scanning. For everyday work, it's also the quickest in the group, producing results in around 10 seconds.