If you are in the market for a portable flatbed scanner to accompany you on business trips then Canon's ultra-thin CanoScan LiDE 35 should be at or near the top of your list.

Weighing in at a mere 1.7kg and measuring just 258 x 374 x 38mm, the CanoScan LiDE 35 uses an LED light source and, because this uses less power than conventional CCD technology, it can be powered via the USB 2.0 interface. So you don't have to carry around a power supply; just plug it into your laptop and you can start scanning. Canon even supplies a USB cable with the CanoScan LiDE 35, which is a rare thing these days.

Canon also supplies a stand with the scanner so that you can use it on the desktop (only single sheets can be scanned like this) or store it upright to save even more space. Canon has designed the lid of the unit to accommodate moderately bulky items such as paperback books or magazines, but you cannot remove it completely to scan larger objects such as a hardback book. Also, because of the scanner's low cost, you don't get things like support for scanning negatives or slides.

The problem with LED scanners in the past was the tendency for them to produce poor quality colour images, but that's not so with the CanoScan LiDE 35. It has a maximum scanning resolution of 1,200 x 2,400dpi (dots per inch) at an enhanced 48-bit colour depth. Scanned images were sharp and accurate with good colour rendition and saturation. Text reproduction was equally good; all text was easy to read. Using the bundled OCR software (ScanSoft OmniPage SE), the results were pretty good, with few errors.

Control of the CanoScan LiDE 35 is handled by four application shortcut buttons on the front of the unit. These launch applications for scanning and copying documents, creating image files and generating e-mail attachments. They can be reconfigured to launch an OCR application or create PDFs.

We tested the speed of the CanoScan LiDE 35 by scanning an A4 magazine page. At its lowest resolution (75dpi) this took 11 seconds to preview and 12 seconds to scan. When the resolution was upped to 300dpi the scan completed in 26 seconds and at its maximum 1,200dpi the unit took just under five minutes to complete the scan. It may not be the fastest scanner around - even though you don't have to wait for a bulb to warm up - but it's not slow, and what you sacrifice in speed is more than made up for by mobility.

As well as the previously-noted ScanSoft OmniPage OCR software, Canon also bundles ArcSoft PhotoStudio 5.5 for working with images and the CanoScan ToolBox for attaching images to e-mails.

There are few portable flatbed scanners on the market, and the CanoScan LiDE 35 is one of the best of them, offering good quality scans at reasonable speeds, topped off with a sensible price point.