Buying an efficient and good quality scanner when you're on a tight budget is always a bit of a juggling act, depending upon whether your priority is speed or detail of reproduction.

The CanoScan 4200F was designed to meet this specific demand and on the whole manages to rise to the challenge. It has a maximum 3,200 x 6,400dpi (dots per inch) scanning capability and makes use of a USB 2.0 cable to transfer the images to your computer, so it's designed to be both fast and accurate.

To speed the process up even faster, there are four 'EZ' buttons on the front of the scanner which allow you to copy directly to a printer via the computer, to save to a file or photo editing folder, to e-mail the image or to convert the picture into a PDF file that will then appear in Adobe Acrobat Reader. The flexible lid makes it easy to scan from thicker material like books or chunky magazines.

In addition, like its predecessor the 3200F, you can also scan 35mm film strips or slides, making use of the plastic Film Adaptor Unit housed in the cover. Four film images or two slides can be scanned at a time but it's still a time-consuming process to load them correctly, and the scanning time is fairly lengthy too, averaging about 40 seconds per film image at 300dpi, plus some time in preview while the light warms up. If you're not in any hurry then the final result is very impressive. The 48-bit colour depth managed to improve on the colour prints from the original negatives in our test sample.

Scanning prints and documents is a lot faster - about three seconds for a preview and 25 for a full A4 scan - and the operation is remarkably quiet and smooth. If you want anything other than a quick print or save, then the accompanying CanoScan Toolbox is the controlling software which will allow you to fine-tune your requirements, including scanning multiple images.

The bundled photo editing package is Arcsoft PhotoStudio 5.5 which is perfectly user friendly if you don't want to use more specialist software like Paint Shop Pro or PhotoShop, while the OCR program is ScanSoft OmniPage SE 2.0 which contains a handy wizard if you get stuck. It would have been equally helpful to have had more than just the Quick Start Guide as a hard copy, although the detailed manual is on the installation CD.

If you want a reasonably-priced scanner that scans your photos and documents quickly and to a high standard then this is a good buy, but you'll have to be patient with your 35mm film as this is a much more lengthy process.