Alright, now we’re in business!
My delivery from Take 2 arrived two days ago and I am now a proud owner of a beautiful black Canon LiDE 100 standalone scanner.
I mentioned the reasons for wanting a scanner previously in these pages and now that I have one, I can made the jump backwards of returning to producing my art on paper and then transferring it to the digital world instead of working completely digitally from step 1. Needless to say, this should bring some more natural lines to the table and I’m excited to be putting pen to paper once again!
And now on to the scanner itself.
It is actually quite a sexy piece of hardware you know, light, slim and sleek in it’s black finish, though it does suffer a bit from those horrible looking grey plastic buttons they went and planted on the front of the thing.
On the performance front, the Canon LiDE 100 is one of the cheaper models available so it won’t exactly knock your socks off in terms of speed, but it delivers solid and relatively fine grain scanning with numerous quality options available to you through the bundled application.
It can handle 2400x4800dpi resolution with 48-bit colour and the four cheesily named “EZ” buttons allow you to copy, scan, email or PDF at the touch of a button. The scanning lid is one of those Z-lid contraptions that allows you to deal with thicker document scans, though it probably wouldn’t handle something hefty like War & Peace of course.
As for my favourite part of the whole device, the scanner runs off a standalone Hi-Speed USB connection, meaning that it transfers data through and draws power from a single USB cable – no extra power cables lying around to trip over on the floor then!
So in short, I’m very happy with this purchase that works well and looks rather nice on my desk. The only qualm I do have is the fact that Canon has released no Linux drivers for the scanner and because they keep the driver code proprietary, no third party has yet been able to reproduce a usable driver for the Canon LiDE 100 under Linux – which of course means that is bye bye Ubuntu box and hello Windows laptop for all my scanning now. :(